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PHASES OF RELIGION 
IN AMERICA 



A COURSE OF LECTURES 



W. S. CROWE 



Minister of The Universalist Church 
in Newark, N. J. 



NEWARK, N. J. 

Printed by Ward & Tichenor 

1893 



B 1951 5 
• G85 



Copyright, 1893, 
By W. S. Crowe 



Transfer 
Engineers School Uby. 
June 29,1331 



To 

My Father 
WILLIAM C R O W E 

WHOSE MANLINESS 

was my youthful 
inspiration 



PREFACE. 

These lectures were written for my Newark congregation in 
the winter and spring of 1891. They were afterward pub- 
lished in The Universalist Monthly. At the request of 
many friends, and with such slight revision as the duties of 
pastor and editor would allow time for, they are given in the 
present form. 

My purpose has not been to set forth the peculiarities of the 
sects but to state the main principles of religious thought and 
feeling in America. This has not obliged me to introduce all 
denominations, but only those that are typical, and has 
left me free to deal with those phases of the religious problem 
which have not institutionalized. 

I have retained the license of popular speech granted a 
lecturer, but I am not aware of such indulgence in any case to 
the point of injustice. A candid and rememberable statement 
of the facts has been my constant aim. I do not conceal my 
purposes, which are made clear in the last four chapters, to 
plead that truth ot religion which overarches all sects and 
that spiritual experience which underlies them all. 

w. s.c. 

Newark, N. J., Sept., 1893. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Puritanism, or, The Religion of the Book i 

Methodism, or, The Religion of Experience u 

Episcopalianism, or, The Religion of Symbols 22 

Universalism, or, The Book Against the Book 31 

Unitarianism, or, Humanity Against Tradition.. . . 42 

Theism, or, The Revolt from the Materialistic 

Revolt 51 

Spiritualism, or, The Religion of Demonstration. . 61 

Ethical Culture, or, The Religion of Agnosticism. 72 

Reform Within The Churches, or, The Religion of 

Interpretation 82 

The Consensus of Reason and Emotion, or, The 

Religion of Eclecticism 94 

The Problem — Is God Good ? 106 

The Method— How God Works 130 

The Hope 143 

1/ 



PURITANISM, OR, THE RELIGION OF THE 

BOOK. 

There is a tradition that Oliver Cromwell was once on the 
eve of embarking for America, and that Charles the First de- 
tained him. We never know when to let things go, nor why we 
keep them. How different the career of Charles, how different 
the history of England, if that sturdy Puritan had followed Miles 
Standish across the sea, and died early in some combat with the 
Indians ! Those terrible wars in which the castles and cathe- 
drals, the throne and the aristocracy, were broken down, might 
never have been. The ascendency of the dissenting churches 
might never have been. The English Church, in the full tide 
of power, might have swept away all dissent, until " Presbyte- 
rian," " Independent," " Quaker," would have been the names of 
historic episodes, and " Methodist " and " Universalist " had 
never come into the dictionary. 

It is difficult to imagine the force which Cromwell's career 
imparted, not only to the spirit of dissent, but to the zeal and 
permanence of dissenting organizations. It is not very difficult 
to imagine that the English Church, without its defeats by 
Cromwell, should have gradually become the church of all Pro- 
testant England — the one church of Protestant America. One 
can see how it would have liberalized with the times to satisfy 
the demands of the thoughtful. We all do see that the extreme 
differences of the sects, in these two and a half centuries since 
the Long Parliament, are largely the differences of outward 
habit — minor differences of thought exaggerated into great 
differences of form ; prejudices, whims, peculiarities, hardened 
into the shells of organization. But for the sectarian principle, 
lifted into supremacy by Cromwell, these thought differences 
might have gradually softened and been at last recognized as 



2 PHA SES OF RELIGION IN A M ERIC A . 

matters of personal privilege in the one all-embracing Protes- 
tant Church. 

It is a fact that the Church of England has adapted itself 
more pliantly to the growing genius of the world than have the 
dissenting churches. The Protestant sects, with the exception 
of such offshoots as Unitarianism and Universalism, are to-day 
behind their Anglican mother in the march of liberal thought 
and tolerant spirit. It may be, however, that these numerous 
sects, by emphasizing the sense of independence, compelled the 
mother church to liberalize — hurried her along to that breadth 
of feeling and that generosity of faith which they now deplore. 

The purpose of these essays is not to solve that imaginative 
problem, but to portray the temper of the various phases of 
religion — mainly imported from England — which have become 
so large a part of our American history. 

The Puritan movement in England was the extra push of the 
common Protestant revolt — not a revolt from the general doc- 
trines of Catholic theology, but a revolt from papal organiza- 
tion. The Church of England did not go far enough to suit the 
extremists. It was a half-shorn Romanism ; without a pope, but 
with king or queen instead of the pope ; with no cardinals, and 
with certain loppings off of the liturgy, but still uncommitted to 
the simpler and more democratic form of church government 
and of worship demanded by the purists. In Geneva they had 
established the extreme informality. In Scotland and in Hol- 
land they had ; but in England the so-called Protestantism was 
a case of arrested development. 

It is not yet generally appreciated what the Reformation was. 
We are often told that it was a battle for liberty of thought. 
There is a little truth in that, but so little as to leave the general 
statement a grievous mistake. It was rather a battle for inde- 
pendent action for a few leaders. For the common people there 
was no independence of action and ho liberty of thought. In 
the old absolute monarchies, the king was master of all. In 
feudal times, each petty lord became the master of a small realm. 
The people exchanged a great master for a small one, but, their 
slavery was not alleviated. The people of Geneva and Scotland 
were transferred from the Catholic to the Calvinist church, but 
they had only gone from the tyranny of councils to the tyranny 



PURITANISM. 3 

of texts — from the command of a priest to the equally absolute 
command of a preacher. The same implicit obedience was 
required of them. Any difference of opinion, any slightest 
expression of dissent, was punished not less severely. The new 
authority under which they died and killed was not a whit less 
cruel or pitiless than the old. 

Reason was no more to be trusted by Calvinists than by Cath- 
olics. Morality was no more of a saving merit in the Luth- 
eran church than in the church of Hildebrand. The very first 
Protestant who intimated that the mind of man ought to be free 
to think out these great religious problems for itself, was burnt 
at the stake, and cursed as one worse than the Catholics by his 
brother Protestants. Servetus was his name, and the slow fire 
of green oak sticks with which brother Calvin scorched him for 
three hours before burning the life out of him, was the same 
kind of an argument that brother Torquemada used to convince 
the thinkers of Spain that thinking was wicked. 

Protestantism said: "We will take the texts of the Bible, 
instead of the words of the pope, as our authority." Protestants 
appreciated that the system of the Roman church, from begin- 
ning to end, had but one function — that function was to give the 
word of the pope an absolute authority on earth. People 
should confess their secret thoughts to the priest. The priest 
was the slave of the bishop. The bishop was made and unmade 
by the cardinal. The cardinal was the creature of the pope. 
Superstition at the bottom. Absolutism at the top. The lit- 
urgy, the mass, the confessional, the splendid ceremonials, the 
priestly pomp and vestments, the great cathedrals, the solem- 
nity, the awe, the reverence for titles — "Your Grace," "Your 
Highness," " Your Sovereign Majesty," "The Holy Father;" the 
mighty festivals, the sublime mummery of a Latin service, the 
gorgeous processions, the colored windows, the shaven heads, 
the black robes, the awful curses of excommunication, the 
pictures of torment, the statues of gods and saints, the teaching 
of constant miracles — to the Protestant it was all a solemn show 
to impress the fears of men and keep them in subjection to the 
pope. 

When protestantism denounced the pope, it must also 
denounce this great machine by which the pope wielded his 



4 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

authority. To rid themselves of him and keep this was but to 
Kill the general and to allow the army to remain quartered in 
their midst. That is what the Church of England did. It 
rebelled from the pope, but preserved the papal machinery. In 
Geneva and Holland and Scotland the Protestants burned the 
cathedrals, or stripped them of every semblance of popery and 
made bare, bleak, white-washed meeting-houses of them. In 
England, the cathedrals were simply modified to a slightly 
different service which a stranger from some other land might 
find it difficult to distinguish from the Roman. 

This was the fight which the Puritans made ; to rid England 
of the last traces of papal machinery. That is why they were 
called Puritans — they would have a pure church. No bishop 
and no priest, as well as no cardinal and no pope. No candles 
and no masses, as well as no images of the mother of God. No 
gorgeous vestments and.no processions, as well as no crucifixes. 
No monasteries, no nunneries, no shaven heads, no confes- 
sional, no prayers in Latin, no counting of beads, no fish on 
Friday, no grand music of organ and choir, no responsive 
service, no committed and repeated devotions, no bowing at the 
mention of Christ's name, no Christmas festivities, no images, 
no pictures, no parish schools, no lives of saints, no religious 
art — absolutely no ceremony, no form, not even the singing of 
hymns, not even the cultivation of the voice that they might 
sing anything. Every semblance of man-made religion should 
depart. They should meet for worship in the most barren and 
ugly room it was possible to build. They should whine the 
psalms through their noses with the most utter absence of a 
musical tone which it was possible for the human voice to pro- 
duce. They should pray in the most unconventional manner, 
taking the most irreverent familiarities with God, and heaping 
into their petitions all the private grudges and political hatreds 
which it was possible to jumble up in an ungrammatical sen- 
tence of the King's English. They should preach heaven for 
Puritans and hell for everybody else, in the most awful terms 
that the ravings and curses of the Old Testament prophets 
afforded. That was Puritanism — a revolt from everything that 
savored of Catholicism — everything bad and everything good. 
Because the priest did not marry, the preacher should not go 



PURITANISM. 5 

unmarried. Calvin did not have time to make love to anybody, 
and so he had an agent seek out and engage a wife for him, 
according to written instructions. Because the priest had 
learned a suave and courteous manner, the preacher was blunt, 
brusque, uncouth, boorish in his manner. It were hardly an 
exaggeration to think of Cromwell as preaching with his hat 
on, flourishing his sword, thundering forth his invectives like a 
mad man. Because the Catholics had splendid art, rich music 
and fine colorings, the Puritan denounced all these as soft, 
effeminate sensualities. The Puritan — the genuine old Eng- 
lish Puritan — despised every form of refinement and culture as 
Sitting Bull despised a feather bed. He connected everything 
that was beautiful with vice. He treated his wife as a weaker 
vessel, who should obey her husband in all things. He pounded 
his children black and blue to make them read their Bibles all 
Sunday afternoon. With a copy of the Old Testament in one 
hand and a sword in the other, he stormed and slashed his way 
through life. 

Such men are capable of martyrdom. Of course they are. 
The Modoc brave, with a hundred scalps at his belt, will die the 
death of slow torture without flinching. It is not trust in God 
either ; it is a brutalized nerve. 

I do not mean to misrepresent those English Puritans. They 
were not smooth hyprocrites ; they were rough soldiers. Per- 
haps it required soldiers as rough, as brutal, as they to combat 
the smooth hypocrisy of the Roman church. Both are bad, but 
Puritanism is not so bad. Brutality can be refined. Hypocrisy 
is hopeless. The virtues of the soldiers are coarse, but they are 
genuine, and they can be made beautiful. The Puritans were 
tyrants — no set of men that ever lived were more cruel and piti- 
less tyrants — but they were honest, and honesty can be devel- 
oped into thoughtfulness and love. 

This is the fight which raged in England for one hundred 
years. In 1540 Henry VIII. began the systematic killing of 
non-conformists. In 1640 the long Parliament was convened. 
The Puritans won the fight. Their victory was of their own 
kind. They dragged a Catholic king out of his palace and 
chopped off his head. It was not a nice way of settling the 
controversy, but it was a sure way; and the Puritan always 
liked a sure thing better than a nice thing. 



6 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

In the meantime this English Puritanism had taken root in 
America. In that three months' voyage across the Atlantic it 
lost some of its bitterness. In going to a new country men will 
become better or worse. The Puritans became better. Here 
they were beyond the reach of their dread enemy. In the bleak 
winters of Plymouth their hatreds cooled down. They must 
build great blazing fires in their cabins and huddle close together 
to keep warm, and their loneliness and the memory of their 
comrades left behind, and their isolation in this vast wilderness, 
converted much of their martial spirit into pathos. Home life 
speedily developed. The ravages of Indians and disease awoke 
the latent tenderness of their natures. 

The tides of energy which had swelled high in their spirits- — 
energy created by a century of war— must find new channels in 
which to flow. There was no Catholic church here to battle, 
no king and parliament to withstand, no cathedral service to 
hate ; and so, this accumulated energy took the form of business 
and education. It must take some form. The waters which 
heap up against a barrier must find outlet — if not in bursting 
the dam, then in turning the mill-wheel. 

Nature makes use of the accumulated power in human souls 
just as it makes use of a soil that is enriched by a hundred over- 
flows. Corn will grow fifteen feet high, if you plant it. Rag- 
weeds will grow fifteen feet high if you do not plant corn. A boy 
that is boiling and seething with superabundant vitality will 
become a great rascal if you let him alone ; a great thinker and 
reformer if you put him on the right track. Steam is up ; the 
throttle is out ; go somewhere he will, with a mighty smash or 
a grand constructive genius. One hundred years of constant 
watching, constant debating, constant gathering up of the cour- 
age, constant marshaling of arguments, constant drilling of 
emotions, constant manoeuvring and battle, had made every 
Puritan a veteran soldier, keen, quick, obedient, tremendous 
with a strong mind and a brave heart filled to the brim ; alwa3^s 
hungry for a fight ; delighted with the stoutest encounter ; 
never so happy as when in the midst of the fray ; never quite 
unhappy except when idle. He found himself peculiarly situated 
in this new America. An exhaust valve he must find or explode. 
Here was the interminable forest and the tough clay soil, and 



PURITANISM. 7 

he went at them with axe and saw and hammer and spade and 
plow as the yeomen of Cromwell on Marston Moor went at the 
soldiers of Charles with whiz of sabre and push of pike. 

They could not get up a theological discussion here. There 
was not an Indian of all the tribes that understood the difference 
between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. Their own 
people knew every text of scripture that could possibly be 
twisted into a Puritanical proof-text. It seemed their occupa- 
tion was gone, but something they must study, something they 
must debate, for, as Mr. Depew says, their hundred years of 
searching after proof-texts had grown into a mental interroga- 
tion point that showed on every Puritan face as large as the 
pot hook in the Puritan kitchen. Something new to find out, 
was the Yankee genius from beginning. 

Proof-texts all discovered,* that hungry-mindedness switched 
off into politics and trade and public education. On a soil and 
in a climate where any other people would have starved, the 
Puritan speedily grew rich. He whittled out new inventions 
on rainy afternoons, and his eye could detect a shilling at a 
thousand yards as keenly as the eagle detects a rabbit. With 
a hundred people to govern they wrought out a plan of govern- 
ment that will serve pretty well for a hundred millions. On 
the very deck of the Mayflower, with their wives and children 
for citizens, those busy-minded fellows, once turned politician, 
must overhaul the plans of statecraft, recite the history of 
kingdoms and republics, discuss the issues of a nation with the 
solemn dignity of a Parliament in session, draft and sign a con- 
stitution, provide offices and swear allegiance. This would 
have been a queer world to the Puritan who was not swearing 
allegiance to something. 

As there were no Catholic children then, and no Quaker 
children as yet, to be captured and disciplined in the true faith, 
they must take their own children and drill them. To drill, to 
teach, had been their work for a century. No chance for theo- 
logical drill now. Their children had all that. Their very 
babies repeated the catechism in lieu of crying when they 
bumped their heads on the puncheon floor. Bible all com- 
mitted, those babies were set the task of worldly knowledge, 



8 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

and Harvard college grew up among the stumps of Cambridge 
before the stumps themselves had time to sprout. 

This is the way that Nature overrules the purposes of man. 
By that full century of theological warfare the Puritan soul had 
been surcharged with energy. That vast Puritan soul came 
over here to worship in its own way. But when there was none 
to hinder its way, it scorned the ease it sought and cast about 
for new obstacles on which to hurl its forces. In these two 
hundred and fifty years that accumulated energy is not yet 
exhausted. It was one of the greatest batteries that the events 
of the world ever stored. It has shown itself capable of running 
this new world, up hill and through the mud of early settle- 
ments, through flood of immigration and fire of war ; and death 
to him who does not carefully insulate his hands when he 
touches any part of the machinery even yet. Whether in polit- 
ical or scholarly or financial contest, be exceedingly careful 
how you take hold of a Yankee. He has never yet been found 
unloaded. 

Understand this, my friends, that the Yankee and the Puri- 
tan, though inhabiting the same body, are two very different 
souls. The Yankee is the soul of business, of invention, of 
genius and education — the upper soul of the two ; the soul that 
holds the reins and wields the whip. The Puritan is the tradi- 
tional soul of him, a sort of remnant of what he brought over 
from England. This Puritan soul of the New Englander is the 
musty old product of the anti-Catholic revolt. This Yankee 
soul of the New Englander is the product of such conditions 
as a fresh world of measureless opportunity had power to 
mother. Two souls so opposite, so antagonistic at every point, 
never before dwelt in one body. It is the dream of Persia 
made actual. A god of darkness and a god of light struggling 
together for the mastery in the brain of a man. Puritanism is 
the darkest faith that ever cast its deadly shadow upon our 
human pathway. Yankeeism is the brightest and gladdest 
genius that ever trod the upward path of progress. Puritan- 
ism hated science and literature and art and music, and every 
culture of manner and every refinement of feeling, with a hatred 
as bitter as death. Yankeeism loved science and literature and 
art and music, and every culture of manner and every refine- 



PURITANISM. 9 

ment of feeling, with a love that is stronger than death. Puri- 
tanism put a ban upon reason, denounced the intellect as de- 
praved, cursed knowledge as the fatal sin of Adam, despised 
the inventions of man as the machinations of the Devil. Yan- 
keeism gave all reward to reason, put a premium on every 
ventured thought, glorified knowledge as Heaven's chiefest 
boon, and exalted the inventions of man as the inspiration of 
the gods. Puritanism denounced the human heart as utterly- 
corrupt ; declared that a mother's love for her child was heinous 
idolatry, that all the sweet virtues of home were as filthy rags 
to the garment of theological righteousness. Yankeeism made 
the loving John Alden and the gentle Priscilla its patron saints ; 
filled its literature — the cleanest, humanest, kindliest literature 
the world ever saw — with pictures of motherhood and wifely 
devotion ; made its New England homes, its typical old home- 
stead, the dearest and sacredest that we know. Puritanism 
taught men to scowl and groan, commanded women to obey 
and keep silent, sent children to the graveyard for their only 
Mayday excursion. Yankeeism has produced the best-natured 
and the jolliest men of business that ever handled money ; the 
freest-minded and most outspoken, the best educated and most 
independent women that ever graced the earth ; and it has 
produced more happy, funny, purely delightful and finely 
artistic books for children than all the world besides. Puritan- 
ism cursed heresy with death and hell. Yankeeism has brought 
forth all the great heretics and all the great heretical churches 
of America. Puritanism set up a short, stout gallows tree on 
which every new idea was to be hanged, while the deacons 
stood around and sang through their noses, " Hark, from the 
tomb a doleful sound." Yankeeism cut down the gallows tree, 
hewed it out and made a cradle of it and rocked every new 
idea into sturdy life to the lightsome strains of " Yankee 
Doodle." 

Well, it shows how a people can be one thing theologically 
and another thing practically. It shows how a tradition of the 
dead and barbarous past can linger on into the time of rational 
and humanitarian progress. The New Englander, as a Yankee, 
from early Monday morning till late Saturday night, had his 
face set toward the future ; as a Puritan, on Sunday, he faced 



lO PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

about and looked backward and downward to the Dark Ages. 
His Sunday self was as unlike his Monday self as Mr. Hyde 
from Dr. Jekyll. He didn't whine when he talked business. 

What is the secret of this peculiar, ridiculous, unnatural 
dualism of the early New Englander? It is this, exactly this : 
in everything else he trusted his own reason and brooked no 
authority; in religion he recanted — and canted — and put his 
neck under the authority of a text. He read the Bible literally, 
and, in his Sunday mood, he honestly thought he believed the 
literalism of it. He read : "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to 
live;'' and he took the witches out to Salem hill and murdered 
them. He read : " Spare the rod and spoil the child ;" and 
when he got mad he took it out on the child. He read : 
"Whosoever believeth not, shall be damned ;" and he didn't 
wait for the process to begin in the next world. He made up 
his theology from isolated texts, and he left out nearly all the 
good texts, as people usually do when they make a theology. 
He read that God was a consuming fire and he didn't notice 
that a better man had said, " Our Father." He could dis- 
tinctly see every passage that referred to punishment, but was 
hopelessly blind to those passages that enjoin forgiveness. He 
was finely alert when he read, " By faith ye are saved ;" but 
his Puritan soul was unresponsive to the Sermon on the Mount. 
Mind and heart of him were under the tyranny of texts, and 
in that tyranny he, too, was a tyrant, whom it has required all 
the genius of his Yankee soul to rescue his own posterity from. 



METHODISM. 11 



METHODISM, OR, THE RELIGION OF 
EXPERIENCE. 

A similar battle to that which was waged between the Puri- 
tans and Catholics of the seventeenth century was fought 
out between the Methodists and the Church of England in the 
eighteenth century. It was in 1629 that Cromwell made that 
furious speech in Parliament against popery. It was in 1729 
that Wesley left the family home for good, taking residence at 
Oxford and beginning those famous prayer meetings which 
were destined to turn the nation upside down. It was in 1640 
that the long Parliament convened. It was in 1740 that Wes- 
ley built the Foundry church, which was in fact, though not in 
name, a proclamation that the Methodists had separated from 
the Establishment. 

Puritanism had run its course in that hundred years, had 
flourished, produced its fruit, exhausted its peculiar genius. 
The time was ripe for a new religion. As nature has a fresh 
flower for every month — arbutus for May, roses for June, golden 
rod in August, asters in September — so there comes a new 
development of religion for the special moral and intellectual 
conditions of every advanced age in human progress. A new 
religion is always an awakening of the sense of genuineness ; a 
protest against some worn and overdone formality ; a cry of 
the masses for fact, for reality, as opposed to theory ; a plea 
for things definite and practical. 

The Puritan said, " Why all your mummery of the masses; 
God hath spoken, let that suffice !" The Methodist said, " Why 
all this debating of texts and display scholarship, all this moral 
exertion to keep the law, all this respectable and formal 
service ; be converted, that is God acting (which is better than 
speaking); it is God creating a new life within you ; let that 
and nothing but that suffice !" 

No man can understand why Methodism appeared until he 
understands the English church of the eighteenth century. 



12 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

Puritanism had conquered the Catholic element in popular 
thought, and henceforth the Church of England was more like 
a real Protestant church. It kept much of the old form, but it 
relied less and less upon that form. Its great ministers of the 
latter part of the seventeenth century and the fore part of the 
eighteenth century were men of moral and intellectual genius. 
They laid stress upon reason and conduct. 

Let these simple facts be made plain : the Catholic depended 
on the church services, on the sacrament : the Puritan de- 
pended on Bible texts : the Church of England kept the 
service as a solemn propriety, accepted the text in a perfunc- 
tory way, but really depended upon reason and conduct. 

The first half of the eighteenth century was an age of skep- 
ticism within the Church. The great preachers had been ap- 
pealing to knowledge instead of tradition. Barrow reflected 
the philosophy of Bacon. Chillingworth had popularized the 
argument from reason, as distinguished from the textual argu- 
ment. Tillotson had set the fashion of the moral argu- 
ment. The name of Copernicus had at last dawned upon 
the Church. That this earth is not the centre and ma- 
jority of creation, but an incidental fact in the infinitude 
of suns and systems, was beginning to have its legitimate 
bearing upon that theology which was the counterpart of 
Ptolemy's geocentric universe. If creation were infinite its 
creator was not the Jewish war-god. If creation were infinite 
it seemed very likely there might be human beings on other 
worlds ; and the curious question came, Did Christ go to all 
those worlds, millions of them, and die to save their inhabit- 
ants ? If this earth is round and turns upon its axis, and 
speeds on through space, where is that physical heaven just 
above the clouds ? Where is that physical hell just beneath 
the grave ? Wonderful that these questions did not come up 
before ! Copernicus had given his teaching two centuries 
ago. No, not wonderful. It takes the average theologian 
about two hundred years to appreciate the bearing of a fact. 
At last, however, the theologians were impressed. Leibnitz, 
following DesCartes, had inspired the pulpit world with a pas- 
sion for physics rather than metaphysics. Butler followed 
Leibnitz and looked for God in nature. Sir Isaac Newton 



METHODISM. 13 

ushered in the eighteenth century. Rationalism was more and 
more freely indulged in high places. Astrology, witchcraft and 
modern miracles were no longer believed in. Hume and 
Gibbon were coming on. 

Luther had declared Copernicus a heretic, had declared the 
earth was flat and square, because the Bible speaks of "the four 
corners of the earth." Men laughed at Luther now. They be- 
gan to deny that the flood had covered the whole earth — where 
would the water come from ? They began to wince under the 
moral turpitude of the 109th psalm. Bishops had no answer to 
make when young curates asked them if God really killed 
thousands of women and children because David had dis- 
obeyed an order. Solomon's seven hundred wives were getting 
to be a theological difficulty. A great many good men were 
doing their utmost to retire Jonah's whale and Daniel's lions 
from active pulpit service. They knew enough of the manage- 
ment of armies and the needs of a great multitude to secretly 
deny that Moses led three millions of people out of Egypt, and 
they wondered how they could interpret the saying that in 
those forty years of journeying through the wilderness the 
clothes of the Israelites did not wear out. Did the clothes of 
the children grow with them, so that a strapping six-footer had 
on the same roundabout that he wore when he was a little boy? 

Samson and Gideon and Barak and Jael and Deborah were 
characters that every refined scholar of the age was diligently 
trying to forget. They were beginning to know enough about 
chemistry to look with suspicion upon that New Testament 
promise to " believers," that they might handle serpents and 
drink poison with impunity. There was not a man among 
them who considered himself enough of a believer to try it. 

When preachers begin to whisper these things in their closets, 
other people shout them from the housetops. 

England was rapidly becoming unbiblical. Montesquieu de- 
clared that in the most cultivated society the very mention of 
religion excited ridicule. Voltaire says the English pulpit had 
become entirely helpless in the toils of skepticism ; that the 
preachers were apologetic and timid, as if conscious that their 
case was lost. In that day, you know, the theory was, as it is 
now with Talmage and Moody, " every word of the Bible or 



14, PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

none of it." Men were still under bonds to the doctrine of 
Bible infallibility. If God wrote the book it is without mis- 
take. If there are mistakes in it, its authorship is human, and 
it is not a revelation. They had not yet learned to say that 
truth is divine ; that human thought and feeling are one half, 
and the laws and facts of the universe are the other half, of the 
true revelation, some of the best parts of which the Jews and 
Christians wrote into our Bible. They had not come to appre- 
ciate that the forces and life of the universe are God's acting 
presence ; that everything we have been in the habit of saying 
nature does, is really what God does ; that nature is only a 
name for his method of procedure. Though they drew argu- 
ments from nature for the existence and wisdom of God, they 
reasoned back from the workmanship to the workman, and 
they thought of nature as holding a certain independency — 
a clock that keeps running, once it is made and wound. 

There is avast difference between the Deism of the 18th 
century and the Theism of the 19th. Theism looks upon 
nature as God's body. Deism looked upon it as his machine. 
Theism makes God the living soul of the universe. Deism 
made him its engineer. Theism absorbs the entire conception 
of nature in the word God. Deism was but an extended, scarce- 
ly an improved, orthodoxy, which broadened " miraculous 
interference " into a general management. 

The skeptics in that eighteenth century church, saturated 
with Deism, looked upon nature as the work of God, a thing 
He had made, carpenter-like, not as the embodied presence of 
God. The thought did not bring them into vital, spiritual re- 
lations with him. Though He made it, nature was a wonder- 
ful, self-sufficient machine ; an infinite, impersonal creation, 
from which the Creator might for an indefinite time remain 
absent. That is not an idea which befits the sense of com- 
munion and prayer. For spiritual life they must go back to 
the Bible, and the Bible they doubted. They felt that to doubt 
a single statement in it was to vitiate the entire book as a rev- 
elation. It seemed that the foundations of religion were slip- 
ping away — all the living bonds which bound them to the In- 
finite were breaking. They were self-frightened. Thought 
seemed destructive of piety. Truth was fatal to devotion. In- 



METHODISM. IS 

tellect, after all, was foe to the church. The case was desper- 
ate. They resorted to the miserable makeshift of conformity. 
The church should be kept alive as a service. They adopted 
the policy of stolidly repeating the historic phrases and refus- 
ing to entertain questions. Think if you must, but don't 
speak it aloud. Believe anything, or nothing, but read the 
prayers in most solemn tone. The more they intoned, the less 
they believed. Conviction was dead. Sermons became literary 
essays, pretty, spiritless, conscienceless, with no power to 
quicken. Exhortation ceased. Earnestness gave place to 
good form. The church was hollow, limp, insipid, respectable 
— nothing more ; with not even enough positive badness to in- 
vite a manly hatred. The end of an age had come. Humanity 
stood idle, waiting a prophet. The prophet was in their midst. 
Not a prophet of the intellect, but a prophet of genuineness ; a 
prophet with a fact. It was a wonderful time for a man who 
had anything to say. Catholic, English church and Puritan 
had all said their say, and had become silent. The field was 
unoccupied. The people were without a leader. No voice 
that lifted was worth listening to. The religious nature of man 
was practically abandoned. The multitudes then, as ever, were 
in need of religious guidance. Poverty, drunkenness, crime, 
vice, sickness, disappointment, sorrow, death, were even upon 
them. The inborn yearning to believe, to trust, to hope, waited 
a quickener. The first to speak, with some genuine word, some 
deep and holy conviction, with the ring of earnestness and 
sympathy in his voice, would be morally certain of calling a 
new and mighty church into existence. 

C^ John Wesley spake — spake to the conscience and heart and 
hope of humnaity. His word was as fire to powder. No leader 
of men that ever appeared in the arena of human life found a 
world so ready for him. No leader ever yet struck a chord 
that vibrated so popularly. Without referring just now to the 
merits of the case, let us clearly understand what character- 
istics a popular movement must have. In the first place the 
thing aimed at must be simple. Whatever requires a great 
deal of explanation, or much careful thinking, is not going to 
sweep down the multitude — at least not an eighteenth century 
multitude. You know how it is in politics. You must reduce 



16 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

the issue to a war cry. You must be able to put the entire pur 
pose of the campaign into a taking phrase, or into one startling 
word. You must not demand of the dear voter a single half 
hour or half minute of thinking. Any such burden as that 
will lose the election to any party that tries it. You must 
whittle it down to the point where a two hours' speech means 
simply this, " Hate England," or " Cheaper Goods," or "Kill 
the Monopolies," or, as in the olden time, " Nigger Equality." 
Get your entire issue into a word that fellows with big voices 
can bellow forth — a word that can flame from a transparency — 
a word that appeals to some common need or prejudice or ani- 
mosity — a word which those who do not think can feel. Then 
fill the papers with that word — fill the atmosphere with it — 
cover the land with a billion-fold repetition of it, as the land 
is covered with snow — get furious in the shouting of it — make 
it a regular blizzard — crush things with the simple dead weight 
of that heaped-up and fiercely-driven word — say nothing else 
— give people time to think of nothing else — keep up the din 
till they are deafened and overwhelmed with the volume of it 
— that is the way to carry an election. That is also the way to 
conduct a revival. 

In religion a popular movement must not only be simple, it 
must also be emotional. It must rouse the heart. It must 
call forth floods of tears. People will do anything you want 
when you get them to crying. A popular religious movement, 
like a call for volunteers to the war, must harrow the souls of 
men ; must plough up the very sub-soil of the feelings ; must 
call forth penitence, shame, remorse ; must appeal to every 
secret and sacred memory — the mother's love and her prayers 
for you — the dying look and word of your child ; must awaken 
your keenest fears, till you see the uplifted arm of God's ven- 
geance and the yawning gulf of hell, as a frightened child sees 
horrible monsters in its dreams. 

These two qualities, in their most exaggerated forms, the 
Wesleyan movement had — simplicity and emotion. > While the 
English church was deciding upon the character of its service, 
enriching its prayers, lengthening its processionals, debating 
forms and methods; and while its great preachers were setting 
forth the philosophies of Bacon and Leibnitz and Locke, ex- 



METHODISM. 17 

plaining this text and carefully elaborating that passage to 
make it tally with the principle of induction or accord with 
some new discovery of science — all of which required the dear 
people to read and think a little, to become interested in art 
and music a little — while the church was dallying thus, the 
Wesleyans stepped forth and shouted, "All this is vanity ! To 
your knees, Oh sinners, one and all, confess your depravity, 
trust in the precious blood of him who died for you, believe 
and be converted !" One single thing to do ; one motion of 
the heart. No use wasting their time in conducting a service ; 
no use giving their years in any intellectual attempt to under- 
stand the Bible ; let the scholars find out whether it agrees 
with science, if they can afford to risk their salvation while 
they study ; no need of this long struggle to build up a moral 
character ; the time is too short that a moment of it should be 
wasted in the tedious formation of good habits; history, 
science, art, literature, education, ethics, everything is vain but 
this : Believe that Christ died to save your soul from Hell, and 
in that belief thank God and be happy. 

Not many of the great, not many of the wise or educated or 
cultured, but multitudes of the ignorant, of the debased, heard 
that rousing appeal and joined in the new and startling cry. It 
reduced the issues of eternity to a pin-point. It solved all the 
vexing problems of human life in a moment. It scorned the 
mighty questions which the philosophers of all time had 
studied, and settled the affairs of the universe in the twink- 
ling of an eye, and without the awkward necessity of brains. 
It made men feel that all the thinking of the ages had been 
useless. The fellow who didn't know whether Julius Caesar or 
Mohammed were a Jewish patriarch, whether St. Paul or 
Abraham had been a member of the English Parliament, felt 
that God had whispered a secret to him which made all sorts 
of human wisdom as chaff in the fire. Scholarship, science, 
astronomy of Newton or Ptolemy, plans of government, meth- 
ods of reform, patriotism of Hampden or statesmanship of 
Pitt, were all a needless buzzing in the ears — the one thing 
essential in this world was to be converted. 

It was the simplest statement that men ever heard. Right 
before you, the brimstone of it in your very noses, is the yawn- 



18 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

ing gulf of hell. The way to keep out of it is to believe that 
Christ died for you. Just that, and ask no questions. Who 
made that gulf of torment ? Why was it made ? Why is 
the whole human race being plunged into it ? How could the 
death of Christ keep people out of it ? None of that — ques- 
tions are not allowable in a revival meeting. It is wicked to 
ask questions. Not another one or it will be impossible to 
save you. 

Whitefield pictured the whole human race as an old, blind 
beggar who had lost his dog and was wandering over the moor, 
drawing near the edge of a precipice ; nearer and nearer he 
stumbled, nearer, nearer, until the congregation of ten thou- 
sand peasants were in agony of suspense, women fainted, 
children screamed with fright, and strong men jumped to their 
feet and shouted at the old beggar to draw back. 

Eloquence ? The world had never known what eloquence was 
until those early Methodists were turned loose upon it. Hun- 
dreds of thousands were spell-bound, hypnotized. Multitudes 
fell to the ground as dead, writhed in the agonies of despair 
which drove many insane, or ran about shouting and raving 
forth their happiness like madmen. 

" It was preaching," says the philosopher Lecky, " not to the 
mind, but to the nerves." Everything was staked on a momen- 
tary flash of experience. People were wrought up to a pitch 
of fear and expectation where each nerve was stretched to its 
utmost tension, and with a feather's weight it must snap. In 
that wild strain of the emotions the whisper of a loving word 
brings collapse, as one more ray of the August sun melts a 
lingering frost-bond and lets down the avalanche. Every 
student of psychology understands it ; nay, it requires but a 
small knowledge of physiology to understand it ; but that ex- 
perience, perfectly natural result of that eloquence, was the 
fact — the indubitable fact — in each converted man's history 
which stood to him as evidence of whatever theories Wesley 
might preach. It is wonderful how men will take an experience 
as proof of a theory with which it has no logical connection. 
Every Methodist supposed that his "conversion" demon- 
strated the doctrines of plenary inspiration, endless punish- 
ment and the trinity. He actually supposed that he knew the 



METHODISM. 19 

operation of the Third Person, applying the merits of the 
Second Person's death, had saved him from everlasting tor- 
ment, according to the pledge of the infallible Word. Thus 
was theology again put in clamps, reason dethroned, and the 
progress toward intellectual liberty arrested. If Wesley 
had stood with Luther to denounce Copernicus as a fraud, the 
probationer would have said, " I know it, for I have been con- 
verted." 

It was the most wonderful stirring up that the people of 
England ever had. Like storm and flood and prairie fire and 
earthquake, all combined, it spread through the nation. It 
transformed the entire social life of the kingdom. It took 
certain moral directions that were good, despite their extrava- 
gance. It condemned luxury and sensuality. At last it spake 
for temperance and freedom. There was a mild revival of 
Puritan severity in it. It condemned dancing and cards and 
the wearing of jewelry as heaven's great enemies ; though it 
did not go the length of condemning it as idolatry for a mother 
to kiss her babe on the Sabbath day. That Wesleyan move- 
ment took certain intellectual directions that were bad. It re- 
vived the old belief in ghosts and witches and modern miracles. 
It scorned the great ideas of science and taught people to think 
of God as a petty deity who struck servant girls blind for daring 
to read other books than those Wesley prescribed ; who sent 
thunder storms to ruin the crops of neighborhoods where the 
revival meetings had been disturbed by rowdies ; who miracu- 
lously cured Wesley's sick horse that its important rider might 
meet a preaching engagement. Morally, the great revival set 
England fifty years forward. Intellectually, it set England fifty 
years backward. 

English Methodism, like English Puritanism, crossed the 
Atlantic to our shores, and was the better for its journey. The 
Methodist type of religion in America has been so strong and 
aggressive that, outside of New England and the coast States, 
it has stamped its peculiar genius upon the thought and feeling 
of the entire republic. When the word religion was uttered forty 
years, ago, east of the Hudson river, the majorities thought of 
Puritanism in its milder forms. When that word was uttered 



20 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

west of the Hudson and the Blue Ridge, the majorities thought 
of Methodism. 

Times have changed. A Methodist church in one of our 
Eastern cities to day is as unlike a Methodist church in a West- 
ern town forty years ago as an Eastern city itself is unlike a 
miner's camp. 

The Methodist parson of that old rousing time was a clear- 
cut and powerful character. He was a man of one religious 
idea, and his familiar question was, " When were you converted, 
brother?" No beating around the bush. He comes to the 
point at once. If the brother had not been converted they 
must have a prayer meeting that night and never let up till the 
thing was done. 

It was the most business-like religion the world ever saw. No 
traveling salesman ever tackled a new town with greater zeal 
and skill and determination and perseverance than the traveling 
parson tackled every neighborhood to which he came. He 
was a genius at managing things, at getting hold of men. He 
was a hale fellow well met. The second time he saw you he 
would slap you on the shoulder, as if you were his oldest and 
dearest friend. He would hitch his horse by the roadside, leap 
the fence and bind wheat or husk corn with the boys while he 
exhorted them to repent. He could tell better stories, and 
more of them, than they ever heard before. He laughed 
heartily, he could sing with unction ; he knew five hundred 
hymns by heart ; he prayed right out of the needs and suffer- 
ings of common people. " O Lord," said father Taylor, "we 
are a widow and six children." The parson was a genuine soul. 
He did not work for money, for honor, but with downright 
and manly earnestness for the salvation of other souls. He 
was a hearty eater, and his horse must have the best stall in 
the stable ; but people were delighted to have him come. His 
face and voice were always full of sunshine ; he had a good 
word for everybody. The father and mother in the Western 
farm house were stronger of spirit and kindlier; the boys and 
girls were uplift morally, and better prepared to meet the 
world, when he had made a visit. He was an organizer of the 
first genius. He could put fifty people together and make 
them do more church work than his cultured brother of this 



METHODISM. 21 

day can get out of a thousand. He was unpolished, loud, but 
he was manly. He could say yes or no to any question of 
conscience without wincing. He was unselfish, though nar- 
row, in his thought. He voted right. He took a stand, from 
which you might as well try to hurl an oak tree or a stone wall, 
for chastity, for temperance, for freedom. He believed in the 
public school and in the Union, and his great church has 
always been the grandest friend to both. He had a financial 
instinct. He preached on four or five hundred dollars a year, 
but he educated his children and owned a bit of a farm before 
he died. 

There were certain peccadillos by which he kept in with 
the worldly-minded. He told stories, sometimes as broad as 
they were long ; he was a great user of tobacco, and he could 
put the shrewdest old dealer on his metal in a horse trade. He 
was an orator of the rough, stump-speaking sort, but with a 
power to convince and move men to action. He wouldn't give 
a picayune for a speech that didn't have one or two good roars 
of laughter in it, and close up with a flood ot tears. He was 
ready to preach any time at a minute's warning. His soul was 
perfectly volatile. Indignation, fun, pathos and pleading fol- 
lowed each other in rapid succession. He overdid it all, for 
cultured ears ; but he was a man of the people, while their 
leader. All in all he was the most typical American of the 
first half of this century. 

There were thirty or forty thousand of him, he went every- 
where, penetrated every nook and corner of this broad land, 
made his presence felt in every gathering of men for every 
noble purpose. There wasn't any nonsense about him. He 
didn't take readily to a new-fangled notion. He gave all novel 
theories to the winds. His head was level and his heart was 
right. He was not a careful thinker. He was a little slow and 
dull in grasping finer ideas and ideals: but he was honest and 
candid. He was a man you could tie to, and when culture 
came it was polish on an oak, not paint on a hemlock. 

Very cordially do I say it, this 40,000-power Methodist par- 
son has been one of the chief forces in shaping the sturdy, 
honorable, knowledge-loving, virtue-loving citizenship of our 
nineteenth century America. 



22 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 



EPISCOPALIANISM, OR, THE RELIGION 
OF SYMBOLS. 

The purpose in naming certain denominations, in these lec- 
tures, is to set forth types. Puritanism is a type, whose class 
includes also the Presbyterian, Reformed, and Baptist churches. 
They are all denominations of The Book. Their great stress 
is belief upon Biblical authority. With Methodists I should 
class the Quakers, also, as preachers of experience. Episcopal- 
ians and Catholics stand together in the genius of symbolism. 
This would not be the naturalist's method. This grouping 
of churches is suggested by their practical working, their pop- 
ular import, not by their structural qualities. 

According to their usefulness, we group oxen and horses in 
one class of domestic animals ; though the naturialist finds that 
an ox is more akin to the buffalo. Structurally, the Methodist 
church resembles the Episcopalian ; but its import to the world 
is very different. When a Methodist minister is called to the 
death-bed of a sinner he prays for his conversion : a Presbyte- 
rian exhorts him to believe : a Catholic priest administers the 
rite. These three words — belief, conversion, rite — are expo- 
nents of the three groups of churches, as they stand in the 
public consciousness. The churches of the Puritan group give 
the general impression that Heaven is obtained by a mental 
grasp of Bible statements. The common Methodist impression 
is that men are saved by a heart-grasp of Christ. Catholics 
and Episcopalians do not make either impression upon the 
public mind. Whatever they may have in their creeds, what- 
ever doctrines they repeat in their liturgies, whatever may be 
their explanations to the confirmation class, they do not stand 
in the popular consciousness as preachers of salvation by theo- 
logical belief or experimental grace. In their ordinary services 
you hear no exhortations to be converted. They hold no re- 
vival meetings. In the common acceptation of the terms, 
they have no prayer or class meetings. They provide no anx- 



EPISCOPALIANISM. 23 

ious seat, no inquiry room. They have no appliances for in- 
stantaneous regeneration. An Episcopal clergyman, at a death 
bed, may proclaim instant salvation by faith, but the church is 
not known abroad for its adoption of any such method. That 
is not its import. 

Catholics claim that The Church has power to save, in ex- 
treme cases, without any faith or feeling or purpose, or even 
consciousness, on the part of the subject. A man is crushed 
in a railroad accident, lying unconscious, gasping his last, and 
the priest arrives in time to get the wafer in his mouth while 
there is still breath in his body — the blessed work is done, 
eternal doom averted. I think most people do not understand 
the Catholic philosophy of salvation in this extreme regard. 
A clear exposition is given by Froude in his essay on " The 
Philosophy of Catholicism." An outline may be given in very- 
few words. The Catholic holds that Christ's body was, in germ, 
a new creation, That his entire physical body, grown about 
that holy germ, partaking of its divine nature, was of pure 
matter, not of impure and sin-stained matter like ours. That 
pure body death could not keep, the grave could not hold. It 
arose from dissolution of its own deathless energies. By a 
constant miracle that divine body is present in the wafer. Who- 
so partakes of the Catholic wafer plants the divine germ in 
himself. About it shall grow his spiritual body. He is " not 
unclothed but clothed upon." Without that spiritual body no 
soul can enter Heaven, but must wander as a ghost or be 
dragged down to the bottomless pit by the sin-loaded weight 
of its resurrected, carnal body. To be excluded from the 
Eucharist was to be left without this protecting and saving 
power of the Christ-life formed about the soul. 

The Episcopal church is not exactly clear on that point. In- 
deed it is not exactly clear on any point of religious philosophy. 
It sets great store by the Eucharist ; but it also lays great em- 
phasis upon baptism. I have it on the authority of a trusted 
friend that Bishop Huntington said he would not definitely 
proclaim the loss of an unbaptized infant, though he would 
most zealously urge the rite. If that requirement were not 
complied with, he could only recommend the little unnamed 
soul to the mercy of God. Many Episcopalians would smile at 



24 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

that, as you' do. At the same time they will have a feeling of 
sacred punctiliousness in regard to confirmation. The general 
impression made upon the outside world is that the Episcopal 
church looks upon the confirmed as saved ; but even this im- 
pression, like the parallax in astronomy, must be subject to 
many corrections. The Episcopalian does not bind himself to 
any one method of salvation. He has a series of methods — if 
one doesn't work, perhaps another will. 

The Methodist — in the good old days when he believed his 
creed — would tell you fairly, squarely, plainly, that infants are 
saved by the Atonement; that beyond infancy people are saved 
by conversion, and in no other way. The Puritan — in the good 
old times when he believed his creed — would tell you, almost 
as clearly, that the infant was saved by the Atonement, provid- 
ing its parents, or possibly one of its parents, were of the elect ; 
that beyond infancy the only way that any man could know he 
was elect was by believing the doctrine. But if you catechise 
an Episcopalian you will find no such clearness and positive- 
ness and singleness of thought in him. He will tell you that 
an infant may be saved by the simple merit of Christ's death 
— you'd better make sure of it, however, by having the little 
one christened. He will not positively declare that Puritan 
belief or Methodist conversion, without eucharist or baptism 
or confirmation, is insufficient. He is metropolitan. When 
hard pushed he will accept almost anybody's plan of salva- 
tion — always insisting, however, that it would be a little 
safer if the rites of " the church " had been complied with. 
If they haven't, perhaps conversion will do. If the man 
hasn't been converted, perhaps belief in the doctrines will 
do. If he had no belief, perhaps a staunch moral character 
and a life-time of righteous living will do. The Episcopalian 
ties with a long rope — with several long ropes. He means to 
send just as few people to Hell as possible. He is a good fellow 
himself, and he is not going to be hard on other good fellows. 

The Catholic is likewise not a theologian. Baptism will save 
infants : but if their inherited guilt is not thus washed away, a 
very little scorching in Purgatory will burn their guilt away. 
The Eucharist, or extreme unction, in a case where there is no 
moral character and no faith, is a happy dependence. But if 



E PI SCOP A LI A NISM. 2 8 

everything has been neglected, the Catholic falls back upon the 
purifying flames of Purgatory and masses for the dead, as the 
Episcopalian falls back upon righteous conduct — there is still 
hope. It has been well and wittily said that Catholics do not 
throw the case out of court at death — they at least give you a 
chance to make a motion for a new trial. 

Now, why is it that these two great churches are so ambigu- 
ous in their plans of salvation ? It is because the very idea of 
salvation, in the strictly evangelical sense, is not exclusive with 
them. They hold the wider idea of religious education. They 
do not come before the world saying, " We are here to snatch 
people from the brink of Hell." They do not commonly 
assume the role of celestial insurance companies. They do not 
go about offering a creed or a momentary experience as a 
guarantee against loss by fire. Sometimes, in special cases, 
they may consent to write a policy, but they do not emphasize 
that part of their work, they do not advertise that line of the 
business. They say, rather, " We are in the world to conduct 
the work of religious instruction ; our great concern is to afford 
spiritual culture." The Episcopal church differs from the 
Methodist as a college differs from an employment agency. It 
is the business of a college to fit men for positions. It is the 
business of an employment agency to secure the position. The 
Episcopal church is here to keep the world in religious mood, 
to build up the kingdom within. The Methodist churches are 
here, like so many life-saving stations, to rescue what they can 
from wrecks. 

We might change the illustration, and say that a farm and a 
fire company have different appliances. It takes longer to raise 
a crop than it does to carry a fainting woman down an escape 
ladder. Men must be ver> differently educated for these em- 
ployments. That is why an Episcopal clergyman and a Metho- 
dist preacher have so little in common. The one goes forth, 
diligently, quietly, to the cultivation of his field. The other, in 
a fury of excitement, " runs with the machine." 

When we say that Catholics and Episcopalians are engaged 
in the worK of religious education, we must put the ordinary, 
limited meaning upon that word religious. They are not spec- 
ially engaged with the intellectual department of religion ; not 



26 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

more than others with moral education ; least of all with theo- 
logical education. Their work is to drill people in the senti- 
ment of reverence ; to cultivate the spirit of devotion ; to build 
up in the soul an exalted sense of piety ; to surround the 
emblems of religion and fill the church with an atmosphere of 
sanctity ; to deepen and strengthen and beautify in all hearts 
the innate feelings of worship. 

While Methodism is the most business-like religion in the 
world, outside of Mohammedanism, the religion of the Epis- 
copal church is the least business-like. It is not business at all, 
it is poetry. It appeals not to the commercial and not to the 
logical faculties, but to the aesthetic faculty. It is not science, 
it is art. It is not philosophy, it is music. 

"The Church" was the mother of art. If it never realized 
the ideal, it did idealize the real. When it does not even realize 
the real, of human toil and suffering, it does teach us to forget. 
It gives beauty for ashes. The stern providence of nature is 
transformed into a providence of love by the harmonies of stone 
in a cathedral. The colored and symbolic windows shut out 
the glare of human strife and surround us with angelic forms. 
The lofty aisle and transept, the slender columns mounting 
and mounting to their cloudy archways, draw our sordid hearts 
after them. The secluded altar and chancel bespeak a holy 
place for the Invisible Presence among the turmoils of earth. 
The quiet, formal, rythmic procedure of the service acts upon 
the reverent spirit by a gentle and affectionate impress. The 
music is far away and full of soft echoes which beget visions 
and dreams o f a better world. The worshiper there does not 
see the tyranny and the ignorance and the wretchedness of 
which those cathedral walls were reared. In those carved faces 
of the saints he reads only the gentleness and patience and trust 
of a pathetic soul, not the sacrifice of all earthly good which 
was demanded by the fierce old edicts of the church. St. 
Catharine in a New York tenement, starving herself to feed her 
children, and St. Catharine of the medieval convent, starved in 
body and mind and heart at the superstitious demand of some 
gluttonous and blood-thirsty cardinal, are two pictures to waken 
the deepest thoughts of men. The cathedral worshiper sees not 
the heroism of the one, nor the humiliation of the other — sees 



EPISCOPALIANISM. 27 

only the gentle pathos of the colored window or the kneeling 
statue, which he also hears in the muffled and fading chant. 
All the terrible realities of the world are reduced to a sentiment 
of soothing sadness. The St. Catharine he read of in the tene- 
ment gives place entirely to this St. Catharine in the window, 
several hundred years away. But in this regard we are all 
sufficiently given to far-sightedness. One need not hasten to 
cast a stone at another. 

The power of the service, Catholic or Episcopal, is to create 
this constant mood of pleasantly-solemn, quietly-earnest devo- 
tion ; to give artistic comforting ; to beautify sorrow ; to slowly 
and sweetly convert pathos into patience. I suppose we all 
have our bigotries, but most of them are in bad form. It must 
be admitted that the Episcopalian has so gently suffused his 
bigotry with humility as almost to make it good form. He is 
able to carry his prayer-book in such a modest-public way, and 
he can refer to the "services" in other churches and to the 
" Divine Service " of his own church with such a consciously- 
unconscious air, that his very egotism seems pretty, if not really 
admirable. These are his weak points, but he — she it generally 
is — has an honest sense of devotion in all this ; and you feel 
that it is only the weakness of a genuine love. All lovers have 
these little weaknesses. The man who never does an absurd 
thing or a silly thing is usually the man who has little real 
affection. 

The Episcopal church has the unsullied love of its children, 
just because it has been a kind mother to them. It has given 
them a happy religious home. It has led them in the paths of 
peace. It has given them charitable work to do, and made 
them feel that they were caring for " God's poor." It has filled 
their hearts with a mild spiritual aspiration, and has not startled 
them by any suggestion of the great practical problems which 
lie couched in that very dubious phrase, " God's poor." It has 
not asked them to do any severe thinking on any problem ; has 
not required them to become defenders of the faith ; has not 
aroused them to any stout grappling with heresy or crime ; has 
not ploughed their consciences with any great appeal for free- 
dom or reform. Its pulpit is not an arena. Its people are not 
heroes. It arouses neither enthusiasm nor animosity. Of all 



28 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

the struggles for intellectual and social progress, it says, " None 
of these things move me." It is a home religion, not a political 
or a missionary religion. Its genius is to refine the traditional 
and ordinary sentiments. There are no heights and no depths 
in its gently-rolling landscape. It is a happy symbolism which 
makes appeal to the cultured eye and the trained ear and the 
modulated feeling. There is no strain of the mind to grasp 
infinity, no prophetic yearning of the heart for a millennial 
society. Its very creed is become an anthem rather than a 
statement of belief. Its doctrines are scarcely recognized as 
ideas, but as holy aspirations. Its confessions of faith are to 
be read as one reads the twenty-third psalm, to breathe out his 
emotions of reverence and trust. John Calvin said that the 
Nicene Creed ought to be set to music ; that it was made to be 
sung, not read. He meant it as a sneer. Heber Newton accepts 
it as a compliment. Those vast, inexplicit, all-compassing, 
cloud-like statements are not to be analyzed, any more than 
you would analyze a sunset. They are a beautiful form of 
words, a series of noble outlines, symbolic of the glory and the 
providence of God. Thoughts are more subtle than speech. 
Feelings are holier than thoughts. The creed is but the shadow 
of a conception of spiritual things. Let it be metrical and reso- 
nant. Round its periods, and expand each definite assertion 
into a poetic image. Set it to music. With sweet melody of 
the voice and the organ, give it again the sacred meaning of 
prayer and praise that it had before it was written, in the heart 
of its author. Translate it back into the reverent emotions 
whence it arose. 

Even such are the Episcopal interpretations. The ordinances 
and articles are a multiform symbolism. All things appeal to 
sentiment. Religion is orderly and pious feeling. The soul is 
rested of its burdens. The heart is comforted of its sorrow. 
The mind is at peace. The grinding and sweating problems of 
earth are unrecognized. The worshiper is led along into the 
loving purpose to be more humble and more patient. It is a 
moonlight world, where all the rough edges of things are cov- 
ered with fleecy folds of mist ; where life loses its tragedy and 
its boundless ambition ; where duty and pain are voiced in the 
minor key, and God seem like a mother. 



Longfellow was in the Episcopalian mood when he wrote 
those charming voice? 

• Come read to me some poem, 

S :me simple and heart-felt lay. 
That shall soothe this restless feeling. 
And banish the thoughts of day. 

Not from the grand old masters 

Not from the bards sublime, 
Whose distant footsteps echo 

Through the corridors of time : 

For. like strains of martial music. 

Their mighty thoughts suggest 
Life's endless toil and endeavor : 

And to-night I long for res: 

Read from some humbler pee: 
Whose songs gushed from his heart, 

As showers from the clouds of sumn: 
Or tears from the eyelids start. 

Such songs have power to quiet 

The restless pulse of care. 
And come like the oenediction 

That follows after prayer. 

And the night shall be filled with mi: sk 
And the cares, that infest the day. 

Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs. 
And as silently steal aw;. 

That is what may be called practical Episcopalian ism — the 
influence of the church upon common people. The Episcopal 
church, however, has another phase. It has made great schol- 
arly developments among its leaders. It has not developed 
theologians or dogmatists, but it has developed students. Its 
thinkers are not textualists. they are humanists. Their line 
of progress has been literary, not exegetical. They love their 
church forms but they have a charming way of avoiding the 
hard places in their creed. Canon Farrar holds a pardonable 
amount of tradionalism, but no accumulation of texts can hold 



30 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

him back from the broad sentiments of Eternal Hope. The 
author of The Kernel and the Husk is quite orthodox on such 
points as have not become personally burdensome, but he 
makes free to set aside all the miracles of the Bible. Phillips 
Brooks lectures nobly on The Influence of Jesus, but he seems 
to forget the doctrine of atonement in making that influence a 
moral help to men and not a legal accomplishment for God. 
Mr. Gladstone calls the Scriptures an Impregnable Rock, but he 
undermines all evangelical foundations by confessing that they 
contain errors, and even some bad teaching. In their general 
influence upon the world the Scriptures are of highest import. 
So say we, all of us. Prof. Robertson Smith, the leading 
scholar of Cambridge, still considered orthodox by the heedless 
world, confesses himself the disciple of Kuenen and Wellhau- 
sen, and looks upon the Old Testament as Hebrew literature, 
not as a miraculous and inerrant revelation. Dr. Driver, the 
leading scholar of Oxford, is the great expounder of Higher 
Criticism for that conservative seat of learning, and he dethrones 
Moses, and annihilates the authorship of David, and divides 
Isaiah, and makes history of the book of Daniel, just like any 
other Rationalist. 

American Episcopalianism is producing hosts of thinkers 
who follow along on these lines of literary development, not 
fearing at all that scholarship will mar the feeling of worship* 
or that the latest critical results have any power to disturb the 
sense of sacredness or the hope of immortality in which the 
church hath its living roots. 

The scholarly, critical writings of this church are suffused 
with fine spiritual sentiment — they warm the heart and lift the 
soul into reverential mood and strengthen all the fibres of 
moral character. Theirs is a free pursuit of truth, a cautious 
liberality of teaching, in a thoroughly religious spirit. The 
personal influence of the church service can be traced through 
all their pages. 



UNIVERSALISM. 31 



UNIVERSALISM, OR, THE BOOK AGAINST 
• THE BOOK. 

From the 4th century to the 19th it was practically con- 
ceded in the Christian world that the Bible is an orthodox 
book — that it teaches endless punishment. 

Prior to the great council of Nicea, in the year 325, Univer- 
salism'was a common doctrine of the church. Many of the 
greatest scholars of those early centuries — Clement of Alexan- 
dria, Origen, Diodorus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Basil the 
Great, Gregory, and Gregory of Nyssa — taught the final restor- 
tion of all men to holiness and happiness. With New Testament 
confidence they looked for "the restitution of all things," when 
" the kingdom should be delivered up to the father" — Christ's 
work of redemption completed, — when "every knee should 
bow," and " God should be all in all." 

During the first few centuries there were six great theo- 
logical schools in the Christian church : one of them taught 
endless punishment ; one taught the annihilation of the wicked ; 
the other four taught universal salvation. In the beginning, 
as now, honest men drew different conclusions from the vague 
teachings of scripture on this important theme. In the prim- 
itive church, however, the larger hope was not heresy. 

It is not difficult to understand why and how the church fell 
from its exalted belief in God. With political power came 
intellectual and moral debasement. A broad sword always 
goes with a narrow creed. Constantine — in many regards the 
most disreputable of Roman emperors — professed conversion 
to Christianity about the year 312. He had political reasons 
for his conversion. It is very doubtful if he had any other. 
His kingdom was rent by sectarian factions and was tottering 
to its fall. It was supposed then, as always, that an army must 
have a religion — that men would not be sufficiently savage in 
killing their fellow-men unless they prayed to some god to help 
them. Worship was a part of the military discipline. Roman 
soldiers, at command of their general, offered sacrifice to the 



8 2 PHA SES OF R ELIGION IN A ME RICA . 

Roman deities. The Christians in the army refused to comply 
with what they deemed an idolatrous practice. They would 
worship only Jehovah. Persuasion, threat, punishment were 
of no avail. A thousand of these Christian soldiers might be 
publicly executed for disobeying the order, but the next man 
would as steadfastly refuse to obey. There were so many 
Christians in the army that to kill them all would be to 
seriously cripple the imperial power. To countermand the 
order — to give up worship — would be a defeat of the emperor 
by his own soldiers. It would ruin all discipline, and it would 
take away the power of superstition. The soldiers of that 
day would only reverence a leader whom they believed the 
gods favored. What was Constantine to do ? What else could 
he do, wise and practical man that he was, than arrange for 
his own very striking and magnificent conversion to Christian- 
ity — such a conversion as would befit an emperor? He saw 
that the Christian element in his kingdom could not be reduced 
to submission. He believed that the heathen element could be 
reduced to submission. The Roman religion was an old, worn- 
out, half-believed system ; Christianity was a new, growing, 
aggressive force ; therefore Constantine became a Christian, 
just as every shrewd politician casts his lot with the inevitable. 

With the establishment of the "Christian Empire" the doc- 
trine of eternal punishment began to flourish. Universalism is 
natural democracy. Its first principle is that every human 
being is created for his own sake — has inalienable rights. That 
doctrine puts every man's conscience in his own keeping. It 
has no need of a priest. Of course any such doctrine would 
become a heresy. The emperors were all too wise not to see 
the political force of the doctrine of endless punishment. When 
the people shudder at the fear of endless hell ; believe they can 
escape it by obeying the priests : and when the priests are fed 
up on fat livings and pompous dignities, which they hold at the 
pleasure of the king — then the king is master of the situation. 

So deep a hold had Universalism on the early church that 
the " Christian Empire," with all its machinery, was two centu- 
ries grinding it down to the limit where that great humanitarian 
principle could be finally condemned as a fatal heresy. By that 
time the church itself was so corrupt, so ignorant, so thor- 



UNIVERSALISM. 83 

oughly heathenized, that Universalism lacked soil and made a 
poor growth. Still its roots were not all dead. Throughout 
that thousand years of Christian superstition and wretchedness 
and slaughter, which we rightly call the Dark Ages, this doc- 
trine of Divine Fatherhood and Human Brotherhood lingered 
on and made fitful efforts at growing. The great preacher, 
Maximus, of the 7th century ; Erigena, the noblest scholar of 
the 9th century; the Albigenses of the nth century; the 
renowned student, Bishop Solomon, of the 13th century; the 
Lollords of the 14th century; the "Men of Understanding," of 
the 15th century; the Anabaptists of the 16th century — one 
after another a company of noble heretics lifted the voice and 
went to persecution and death for this eternal and fraternal 
hope. 

For the sake of intelligence and kindliness alike the Refor- 
mation had unfortunate leaders. Calvin was disgustingly cruel, 
and Luther was pitiably superstitious. They crushed the 
broader philosophy as the Catholics had. The English church, 
however, struck out the article condemning Universalism in 
the latter part of the 16th century. That is why there has 
never been a Universalist church so called in England. Mem- 
bers of the established church are free to believe it, and they 
do believe it by scores of thousands. 

The modern Protestant sects have nearly all followed Luther 
and Calvin in the paths of superstition and cruelty. They have 
made God a monster and creation a mistake. Their heavens 
have been erected on the narrowest sectarian lines ; their hell 
is cosmopolitan. They have bitterly assailed each other at all 
other points and angles of dogma ; their only union has been a 
common threat of torment for everybody else. 

The great pitched battle came in America. It was fought out 
with texts — phrase against phrase and word against word. The 
Universalists gained a substantial victory — not complete, but 
they captured so many forts that the enemy became alarmed 
and withdrew from the field in good order. For fifteen centu- 
ries the Bible was generally considered an orthodox book : that 
verdict is now as generally questioned. 

In 1770, John Murray, an English Universalist, landed on 
these shores. He was listened to by such men as George 

5 



3 4, PHA SES OF RELIGION IN A ME RICA . 

Washington, Benj. Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Dr. Benj. Rush, 
all of whom took a deep interest in his nobler thought of God. 
He was the only man that Jefferson would hear preach. Mur- 
ray began the fight. He declared that the Bible did not teach 
endless punishment ! It was as if some man of the 16th century 
had declared that kings ought to give way to a popular vote ; 
as if some man of the 12th century had declared the earth was 
round. What people have believed for a thousand years, we 
suppose must be true. Murray simply invited the hatred and 
the abuse of the whole orthodox world, and the invitation 
was warmly accepted. At the end of about ten years he made 
one notable convert : Dr. Elhanan Winchester, pastor of a 
Baptist church in Philadelphia, and one of their most scholarly 
men. During the nineties there came another notaDle recruit 
from the Baptist church — Hosea Ballou. By the year 1800 the 
fight was waxing hot. The Universalist missionaries traveled 
everywhere and were everywhere assailed with a bitterness 
which America had not seen since Puritans gave over the 
hanging of witches. 

In 1803 the scattering heroes banded together and formed a 
denomination and put forth a creed. Then came the onset 
with furore and carnage. For fifty years that Universalist 
church was a universal debating society. It had just one thing 
in view — to prove that the Bible teaches the final restoration 
of all men to holiness and happiness. 

Some of these fierce old debaters were trinitarians ; some 
of them were unitarians ; some of them believed that all sin 
inhered in the body, and that death itself was salvation ; some 
of them believed that all men would be saved because Christ 
died for all — surely the only logical conception of atonement if 
atonement one must have ; some of them believed in more or 
less punishment in the next world, according as a man had 
been tolerably bad or very bad — surely the only reasonable con- 
ception of punishment if punishment be God's method of 
dealing with our human frailties ; some of them most rationally 
believed in salvation as a thing of moral education, and said, 
of course men must suffer until they do right, until they learn 
how to do right, in this or any other world ; but, whatever their 
differences as to the plan, they united on the ultimate effect ; 



UNI VERS A LISM. 3 8 

and they also united in the conviction that God, in the Bible, 
had revealed that the great final outcome of existence, of joy 
and suffering and life and death and study and struggle, 
should be a good and happy outcome. 

It was a unique movement in the world's religious history. 
It was based on the Bible, but it was a new interpretation 
against the old interpretation. It faced the traditional teach- 
ing of fifteen centuries, and declared that all through those ages 
the church had read scripture with stigmatic eyes. It made the 
challenge to all past thought of revelation as squarely as Darwin 
challenged the old geology, as bravely as Copernicus challenged 
the old astronomy. It widened the Bible meaning as modern 
science has widened the universe. It made God the father 
of all nations. It made providence a divine care for all worlds- 
It abolished the death limit and made Christ speak to the con- 
ditions of eternity. It declared that this Word of the Infinite 
was not a private message to Jew or Christian, but an universal 
proclamation of life. That was a dignified and noble estimate 
of what a revelation from the God of the universe should be. 
The Bible was his word to the universe, not his word to a sect. 
Christ was a Savior from eternity to eternity. There was a 
commanding force, a flood of light, in that kind of preaching 
which stirred the little philosophies of Christendom, as Caesar 
and Napoleon stirred up the little kingdoms of the old world. 

For fifty years these missionaries of the universal meaning 
of religion ploughed the land. There were only six or seven 
hundred of them, .and they just about held their number. 
They made new converts to their great peculiar ministry just 
about as fast as the old war horses died. They were not after 
converts ; they were after the kingdom. They meant to estab- 
lish a world wide interpretation of scripture, and let that do its 
work. All they asked was a chance to be heard. When 
churches were barred against them they took to school houses, 
barns, court houses, camp grounds in the summer time. They 
preached continually. They challenged everybody. They con- 
ducted thousands of public debates, many of them lasting day 
and night for two or three weeks. The question of debate was 
always, " Does the Bible teach endless punishment ? " Woe to 
the luckless champion of orthodoxy who dared to face one of 



36 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

them. They knew the Bible by heart. Where he could quote 
one text they could quote a dozen. Six or seven hundred of 
them against a hundred thousand, against fifteen centuries of 
accumulated tradition, against the entire sentiment and preju- 
dice of the world ; but they hammered away until, as Dr. Miner 
declares, the last fort was captured. 

In the year 1800, almost any evangelical minister would say, 
" Why, of course, the Bible teaches in a hundred places that 
the vast majority of the human race shall be damned." In the 
year 1850, the average evangelical minister would say, "Well 
there is one text at least that the Universal ists will have trouble 
in getting over. How will they interpret the words of Christ, 
' And these shall go away into everlasting punishment.' ,: But 
the Universalist was ready for him, and in Yankee fashion asked 
him in return, how he would get over the words of Genesis that 
Israel should have the land of Canaan " for an everlasting pos- 
session." 

All the words of the Bible which have been translated ever- 
lasting, eternal, endless, forever, etc., received the most careful 
study, and with the astonishing result, acknowledged to-day by 
all scholars, that many of them should not be so translated. 

The Universalist was a genius in the matter of interpreta- 
tion. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus he construed 
into a prophecy of the downfall of Judaism. He depersonal- 
ized the Devil — contracted the D and left of him but a generic 
name for evil. He declared that God was a " consuming fire " 
as the furnace of a refiner is — to consume the dross and purify 
the gold. He taught people how to read all the little obscure 
texts in the light of certain great imperial texts. " As in Adam 
all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." There is the 
course of the Mississippi ; if you find a brook rippling in another 
direction be sure its waters must finally turn down the conti- 
nent slope. 

The Universalist fathers followed the injunction of Wesley 
and became "men of one book." Of no other class of preach- 
ers could it be said with such emphasis that they were " mighty 
in the Scriptures." A characteristic story is told of " Father 
Streeter." By some mischance it occurred that the Univer- 
salist and a Methodist had both been announced to preach 



UNIVERSALISM. 87 

in a New England school house on the same evening. Both 
arrived, each ignorant of the other's purpose. Streeter offered 
to give way, and the Methodist invited him to make the prayer. 
" V^ry well," said Streeter, " I will pray at the close of the 
service." Then the Methodist preached a tremendous sermon 
against Universalism, ringing all the changes on the word ever- 
lasting. When Streeter arose to pray he began : " We thank 
Thee, O Lord, that thou hast said, in the book of Isaiah — 9th 
chapter, 6th verse — that men shall call Thee by the name Ever- 
lasting Father, and that Thou hast said in return — Jeremiah, 
31st chapter and 3d verse — that Thou dost love us with an 
everlasting love. We thank Thee that in the 103d Psalm, 17th 
verse, Thou hast proclaimed that Thy mercy is from everlasting 
to everlasting. We thank Thee that Thou hast spoken by the 
mouth of the prophet Ezekiel — chapter 18, verse 23 — saying, 
' I have no pleasure at all that the wicked thould die ; but my 
pleasure is that he should return from his wicked way and live ;' 
and we thank Thee that Thou has confirmed this word by the 
mouth of Thy prophet Isaiah — chapter 46, verse 10 — saying, 
' My counsel shall stand and I will do all my pleasures.' AVe 
thank Thee, O Father, that we can trust in Thy love, as Thy 
holy apostle Paul trusted ; exhorting, in his first letter to Tim- 
othy— chapter 4, verse 10 — that Thou are the living God and 
the Savior of all men. We thank Thee that in the epistle to 
the Hebrews — chapter 2, verse 9 — Thou dost reveal that Jesus 
tasted death for every man ; and that Thou hast confirmed this 
revelation by the mouth of Thy Holy Son himself, who said — 
Gospel of John, 12th chapter, 32d verse — 'And I, if I be lifted 
up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.' "... And thus 
he proceeded with a universal psalm of thanksgiving, with text 
after text, giving chapter and verse, for half an hour ; closing 
with that grand consummation — First Corinthians, chapter 15, 
verses 24 to 28 — " that Christ shall reign until all enemies are 
destroyed, and then he will deliver up the Kingdom to His 
Father, that God may be all in all." 

The power of that unique ministry was also its weakness. 
Those men of the text were little else. They did not organize 
their churches for worship and work. They did not drill people 
in the methods of religious enterprise. They gave small heed 



38 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

to Sunday schools. Until about the close of that half century 
of debate they did not begin to found colleges, or have any 
system in their publications. They did not frame any consistent 
philosophy of religion. " Higher criticism " and the " scientific 
method " were unknown to them. They accepted, hap-hazard, 
a great many traditional teachings which had no place in their 
body of thought. They had a solid fortification of proof-texts 
— all else was at loose ends. If you asked them what they 
meant by the Holy Spirit or the Divinity of Christ, or what was 
the manner of revelation, or what the office of faith, their 
answer was fog. To this day the whole world is asking, on all 
other questions than the final outcome — What do Universalists 
believe ? Their creed was a compromise, sufficiently ambiguous 
to include everybody who believed in final restoration. On 
that idea alone was their preaching distinct. Their congrega- 
tions were of middle-aged men and a few courageous women. 
Few people joined the church. Their churches were not wor- 
shiping places, but preaching posts. They were theological 
debaters. There was little of the devotional element in their 
sermons. They aroused antagonism. The story is told of one 
of them, that he lost his temper in debate, and in reply to some 
argument about the justice of God, grew livid with anger, and 
in a voice that fairly hissed, while his eyes flashed with the fire 
of wrath his words denied, screeched forth, " I tell you, sir, that 
God is love." 

If ever men were excusable for losing temper, they were. 
Conscious of its defeat on every fair field of battle, the evangel- 
ical world attacked them from ambush with misrepresentation, 
prejudice, and all the poisoned arrows of slander. But they 
compelled that evangelical world to study the Bible instead of 
its creeds. Out of that new study has come the liberalism of 
all modern sects. They have obliged evangelicalism to confess 
that Milton and Calvin and Dante and Augustine and Athan- 
asius, not Paul and Jesus and the Prophets, are the authors of 
its belief in endless torment. That is enough for one genera- 
* tion of men to accomplish. To demolish one, and that the most 
gigantic and harmful, error of fifteen centuries is enough. 

Perhaps the completest literature that was ever produced on 
any single idea — the most exhaustive, trenchant, unanswerable 



UNIVERSALISM. \ 39 

— is the literature of Universalism ; but it is so completely a 
literature of one idea that it does not satisfy the philosophic 
mind. It is simply a thousand-fold demonstration that the 
Bible does not teach endless misery. That is not enough to 
build a church upon, not enough to build a religious character 
upon. It has an inherent weakness in this, that it relates to 
the outcome of things, not to the process. A grand thing it is 
to believe that finally all men will become good and happy, but 
the people of the present age want a working process for to-day. 
To do something now is more vital than to believe something 
for the next century or the next world. Methods for the 
present exigency are far better than brilliant dreams of a mil- 
lenium. The question that presses home to every church 
to-day, is not " How many will God save in the outreaching 
future ? " but " How many are you saving in these present days 
of cold and hunger and drunkenness and sensuality?" That 
was the fatal weakness of the old Universalism. It was too 
other-worldly. It was so anxious that Heaven might be full of 
happy souls that it almost forgot the necessity of happiness on 
earth. It was so busy in rescuing the character of God from 
bad imputation, that it had little time for rescuing the hearts 
of men from hatred and prejudice. 

" This one thing I do " never found such embodiment. 
Their one work they did well. They showed how the doctrine 
of endless misery slandered God, robbed Heaven itself of joy, 
filled the earth with cruelty. It was enough that for fifty years 
those heralds of the gospel of hope should beat down the 
horrible belief in hatred and torment. All churches to-day reap 
the benefits of their labors. All the old creeds are softening. 
So mercilessly did they pommel and scorn the idea of endless 
Hell that it is a rare man in a queer neighborhood who dares 
proclaim the doctrine. Europe had her hundred years war, 
into which the treasures and lives of all nations were poured 
like water, to dethrone the political tyranny of the church. In 
the last hundred years the doctrines which for fifteen centuries 
had been the foundation of all tyranny, political, ecclesiastical, 
intellectual, have been destroyed. American Universalism de- 
serves credit for a noble share in that victory. 

We have entered a new era. Religion henceforth must rest 



40 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

upon some other basis than fear. The day of threatening is 
gone forever. Men no longer wince under a preacher's talk of 
Divine wrath — they pity the i8th-centuryism of the preacher. 
Hell is not a terrible word any more — it is a jest. The new 
revision calls it Skeol, and we smile at the timidity. The Devil 
has gone the way of all the other ghost stories with which they 
used to frighten the little children. When one of the old 
creeds is brought forth from the dust and mould, as it has 
been in the Presbyterian discussion, men read it with horror 
and nausea. No longer afraid, people think. The incubus of 
the ages has been unloaded. Worship to-day is reverence, not 
the cold sweat of anxiety. Prayers are sympathetic feelings, 
not a slave's plea for mercy. 



The New Universalism. 

During the last generation a wonderful change has come 
upon the Universalist church. It maintains the old conclusion 
— the final good outcome of things ; but the younger and more 
progressive elements of the denomination start from a different 
premise. Textualism is rapidly passing away. The new Uni- 
versalism does not rest upon the Bible as God's miraculous 
word. It treats the Bible as literature. It sees God's word in 
man's moral sense, in the principles of right that have been 
established by experience, in the demonstrated laws of life, and 
in the essential results of conduct. New Universalism discards 
the Atonement and looks upon Jesus as the greatest of moral 
teachers and the purest of human examples. It discards the 
primitive Universalist idea that sin inheres in the body and 
that death leaves the soul pure. It believes in the continuity 
of character. Men enter the next world with the goodness or 
badness in which they die. None are saints ; none are devils. 
Entire sanctification and total depravity are alike mythological. 
" Going to Heaven " is not salvation : salvation is character. 
The word " destination," in our creed, is an outgrown word. 
Even the modern substitute — "destiny" — does not meet with 
favor. The coming leaders of our church believe in more free- 
dom than " destiny " intimates. Men shall be happy, in this 
or any other world, when they become good. The result is in 



UNIVERSALISM. 41 

their own keeping. New Universalism does not dogmatize upon 
the events of eternity. It devoutly hopes and firmly believes 
that all wicked men will, some time, reform and do right. This 
new Universalism has entirely abandoned the old theological 
" scheme." The Fall in Adam is mythological : its place is 
usurped, its existence blotted out, by the doctrine of evolution. 
The word " restore " drops from our creed. There was no prim- 
itive glory to which men can be " restored." Primitive man was 
a wild savage. The course of providence, past, present and 
future, is education, growth, refinement. To save is to influence. 
New Universalism repudiates the intimation of Trinity in our 
creed. Of course that was a compromise, intended to mean 
much or little, as occasion might require. The time is past for 
any such compromise. But the chief distinction of New Uni- 
versalism is that it places emphasis on the present and on 
methods, not on promises and faith. Faith is worth exactly 
what it produces of good conduct. The effort to prove that all 
men will finally be happy is not recognized as the preacher's 
greatest mission. To unite with all who labor for man's present 
good is the duty near at hand, and most sacred. 



4 2 PHA SES OF R ELIGION IN A ME RICA . 



UNITARIANISM, OR, HUMANITY AGAINST 

TRADITION. 

Wm. Elery Channing, the founder of American Unitarianism, 
was born in Newport, R. I., April 7, 1780. Newport was a 
small fishing town then, with no hint of its modern style of 
living. His father was the leading lawyer of the place, and a 
strict member of old Dr. Hopkins' Puritan church — strict, /'. e., 
in outward observance without any keen realization of the 
meaning of the Puritan creed. 

Little Wm. Elery was a very precocious child, and had begun 
to write some readable essays at the age of ten. One Sunday 
in August of his eleventh year, as he walked quietly home from 
church with his father, he began to cry, and kept on crying. In 
answer to repeated questions as to what the matter was, he 
finally sobbed out that he felt so bad because nearly all of his 
playmates were going to be eternally damned. 

As ii it was not already hot enough that August morning, old 
Dr. Hopkins had preached a blazing sermon on " Elect Infants," 
and had left the impression that only the children of Simon- 
pure Calvinists had any chance at all of escaping August 
weather a million fold intensified for all eternity. 

There was the one little Calvinist church in the town ; there 
was a Methodist church ; a Universalist church ; a Quaker 
church ; and about half the people attended no church. Not 
more than one family in ten could have the faintest hope of 
salvation. A hundred years ago a Methodist was no better than 
a Universalist in the eyes of such a Puritan as Dr. Hopkins. 
Little Wm. Elery thought over his schoolmates, the boys he 
studied and played with, and it happened that almost all of 
them were of the non-elect. He went out into the garden and 
cried till it seemed his heart would break. His kind father 



UNITA RIA NISM. 4,3 

sought him and tried to comfort him, but there was no com- 
fort for him ; he could eat no dinner ; his mind could not be 
diverted ; he felt that he could never look at one of those 
playmates again without thinking how, through all eternity, he 
would be burning and screaming with pain. And then the 
story goes that the lawyer-father said to him, " My son, did 
not Dr. Hopkins explain to us that if your playmates are to be 
eternally damned it is because of God's decree, and with the 
decrees of God we must take no liberty ? We must bow our 
reason to his will ; and though we cannot understand it, we 
must feel that it is right and just." But the loving little rebel 
blurted out, between his sobs, " No, father ; it is not right — it 
is not just. Those boys are just as good as I am. Why should 
I be saved and they tortured ? " Like a sensible man, the 
lawyer appreciated that the child had utterly routed his argu- 
ment — the prosecution had no case — and he went back to the 
house, and lighted his pipe, and welcomed the cooling breeze 
which floated across from the gently heaving tide — sat, and 
rocked, and cooled his brow, and smoked his pipe, as if nobody 
ever went to Hell. Little Wm. Elery looked at his father, 
taking life so comfortably, without a line of sorrow on his face 
for all the millions and billions of human beings that were sink- 
ing down into torment, for all his neighbors and friends that 
were continually dying without hope — and the boy dried his 
tears, and in blank astonishment gazed upon that perfectly 
comfortable father. That boy was harboring strange thoughts 
of his father. Could it be possible that such an upright and 
honored man, so gentle and kind to his family, was yet a stony- 
hearted monster, who cared no more than that for the eternal 
agony of his friends ! Then a new thought crept into the 
child-mind — revolutionary suspicion — could it be that his father 
did not believe what Dr. Hopkins had said, did not believe in 
the endless torment of his neighbors, did not believe the creed 
of the church to which he belonged ! And the child straight- 
ened himself up right manfully and said, " My father does not 
believe it, and I do not believe it." 

That was the beginning of American Unitarianism — that 
August Sabbath of the year 1790, in the tender, true, noble, 
honest heart and mind of that ten-year-old boy of Newport. 



44 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

When you happen in the fashionable watering place, go 
around to the corner of Mary and School streets and look at 
that house which is now consecrated as a "Children's Home," 
and remember that it was in the garden back of it where little 
Wm. Elery Channing stood and wept at thought of the damna- 
tion of children ; stood and revolted against the horrible idea, 
declaring it unrighteous and unjust. That Children's Home 
was the childhood home of him who lifted his voice and set 
his mighty pen in immortal pleadings for the inherent good- 
ness of children — their natural right to be treated kindly by the 
inhabitants of earth and heaven. That voice and pen for more 
than forty years were employed impleading the religious rights 
of man. 

Throughout the Christian ages everybody else had ap- 
proached the problems of life and destiny from the Divine, or 
what was supposed to be the Divine side. Channing approached 
those problems from the human side. All these Christian cen- 
turies men had been asking, " What says the church, what says 
the Bible ? " Channing asked, " What says the human heart, 
what says our common sense of right and justice ? " For 
fifteen hundred years the theologians had been asking what 
people could do, what they could believe, in order to satisfy 
the demands of Heaven. Channing reversed the query, and 
asked what Heaven would do to meet the just demands of 
people. Fall of Adam, Atonement, Plans of Salvation, must all 
retire while the universe considered this : " Is it right to damn 
a boy, or a man, who is worthy of our human regard ? " Let 
him be a Methodist, a Universalist, a Quaker, a Jew, an unbe- 
liever, a heathen, an atheist — if he is worthy of our human 
love he is also worthy of the Divine love. If he does nothing 
for which we should torture him, then God should not torture 
him. If he is fit to live on the earth he is fit to live in Heaven. 
If he proves himself a good neighbor to human beings, the 
angels cannot afford to be unneighborly. 

There was no use of saying that God had a plan which the 
man could have adopted, no use of saying that he might avail 
himself of the atonement. Channing stood up, quietly, lov- 
ingly, reverently, firmly, to declare that if the man made a 
good character for himself any further requirement was unjust. 



UNI TA RIA NISM. 4, S 

A student shall pass his examination at the end of the term, 
but no college has a right to demand that he shall write his 
examination papers in red ink or lose his diploma. The only- 
demand that the eternal justice has any right to make is that a 
man shall have good character. 

Even the early Universalists had battled for a happy outcome 
of things on the ground that it had been revealed in the Bible 
— rejected eternal punishment because the Bible did not teach 
it. If one of those early Universalists had become convinced 
that after all he had been mistaken, that the Bible really did 
teach endless punishment, then, as a conscientious believer in 
revelation, he would have changed his creed and would have 
gone back into some orthodox church. Cases are on record of 
men who once preached Universalism, and who did that — went 
back and back, even to the Catholic church. 

Channing did not deny the eternal punishment of heretics 
on the ground of revelation. His thought was not determined 
by what the Bible had said, but by his human sense of justice. 
It was unjust to punish an honest heretic. It was not just to 
torture a good man, whatever his belief or unbelief. 

Thomas Starr King, who started out in the Universalist 
church and ended up in the Unitarian church, used to say that 
he was a Unitarian-Universalist. When somebody asked him 
why he used both words, he replied, " Because I believe both 
doctrines : the Universalist doctrine that God is too good to 
damn people, and the Unitarian doctrine that people are too 
good to be damned." 

Universalists preached the fatherhood, the kindness, the 
love, of God. Unitarians proclaimed the virtue, the merit, the 
worthiness, of mankind. 

It was Channing's constant habit to point out the goodness 
in unbelieving and unconverted people ; to dwell upon those 
virtues which had no relation to creeds — a mother's love for 
her child ; the kindness of brothers and sisters in their home- 
life ; the sense of duty and honor in soldiers, workmen, trades- 
men, scientists ; the compassion and sympathy that any tramp 
in the street or any millionaire in his carriage will feel at seeing 
a sick child fall by the way. These are natural, untheological 
virtues. Honesty in trade, truth in politics, kindness toward 



46 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

animals, courtesy and deference in the presence of aged people 
— all the common nobilities of character, by which the world 
has its moral progress, homes their happiness, individuals their 
good name — these are untheological virtues, about as likely to be 
found in a doubter as in a believer, in an unconverted man as 
in the converted man. It is these common virtues, Channing 
declared, and not belief in a creed, not participation in any 
atonement, not as the pensioner of mercy or the object of any 
decree — it is just these common, simple, everyday virtues 
which a man builds up in himself that constitute his salvation 
here and hereafter and forever. 

That was a new basis, altogether new. That was character 
against faith, humanity against tradition. It was exactly the 
reverse of all that the religious world had preached for fifteen 
centuries. 

Since the time of Constantine the church had said, " A man 
is saved by faith, no difference what his character." Channing 
said, "A man is saved by character, no difference what his 
faith." For fifteen hundred years the church had said, "God 
can do what he will with his own — if He cast men off it is 
justice, if He save them it is mercy — destiny is determined by 
the Divine will." Channing said, " No ! Destiny is determined 
by human will. It is not mercy, but Divine obligation, to save 
a good man. It is not justice, but cruelty, to cast any man off — 
to do less than everything in this and in all worlds to reform 
the lowest and worst." 

For fifteen centuries the church had said, " Man began his 
career in holiness, but fell into depravity." Channing and the 
Unitarians have said, " No ! Man was created in perfect igno- 
rance, left to shift for himself, had everything to learn, every- 
thing to suffer while he was learning. Nature never made an 
excuse for him. She will burn the dimpled babe that falls in 
the fire. Every kind of pain and sorrow has come upon the 
children of men because they were created ignorant. Consid- 
ering their disadvantages they have done pretty well. They 
did not fall from Eden, they have come up from barbarism. It 
has been a constant evolution, not degeneracy. They have not 
deserved Hell, but infinite patience and kindness." 

All these fifteen centuries the church had said, " The Devil is 



UNITARIANISM. 47 

the primary cause of human misery." Channing said, " No ! 
Ignorance is the primary cause ; and there is evil in men yet 
because they are only yet half developed. The tiger and the 
fox and the serpent and the donkey inheritance is not all cul- 
tivated out of them. Evolution has not yet carried them up 
fully into the human estate. Not one pair of eyes in a hundred 
are completely formed. No face is perfectly beautiful, no form 
is exact, no mind is free from superstition, no moral nature 
fully rounded out." 

For fifteen centuries the church had said, " If man has any 
good in him it comes by operation of the Holy Spirit, without 
whom he could not have one good thought." 

Channing said, " No ! A man's good thoughts are his own. 
All his morality, like all his knowledge, he has suffered dearly 
for, won by the stoutest battles, wrought out in the deepest 
griefs and disappointments." 

For fifteen hundred years the church had said, " The Bible 
was given to man, a revelation to teach him the way of life." 
Unitarianism said, " No ! Man found the way of life as he 
found all other knowledge, and wrote his spiritual discoveries 
in that great old book — discoveries worthy to be called Bible." 
The church had said, " God allowed Abraham to believe in 
polytheism, allowed Solomon to keep a harem, allowed the 
Hebrew priests to worship him with animal sacrifice — then in 
the New Testament prohibited polygamy, supplanted animal 
sacrifice, required no longer an eye for an eye and a tooth for a 
tooth, but required forgiveness and mercy — and so, the Bible is 
a progressive revelation. God adapted himself to the primitive 
time, then put forth higher truth as men were able to bear it." 
Unitarianism said, " No ! The Bible allowed polygamy in Solo- 
mon's time because the men who wrote that part of the Bible 
did not know any better, had no better morals. It allowed 
David to be a murderer, and still called him a man after God's 
own heart, because murder in that barbarous old day was not 
inconsistent with religion. The Bible is not a progressive 
revelation, but a progressive discovery of moral principles — 
discovery through many sad and shameful experiences." 

Thus you see that Unitarianism put an entirely new founda- 
tion under its religion. It based everything upon the human 



48 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

foundation ; it did not hang its religion to a hook in the sky. 

In the fewest and simplest words at my command I want to 
show you how Unitarianism passed, by a course of severe logic, 
from belief in human goodness to a denial of the Trinity. 

Every distinctly evangelical doctrine depends upon the 
assumption of eternal torment. Take that away and the entire 
system of traditional theology falls, as an arch falls when the 
keystone is removed. Now, I want to show you how that is 
true — how Channing, in the progress of his thought, exem- 
plified it. He did not believe in endless torment. Why ? Be- 
cause men do not deserve it. Men are too good or too ignorant 
to be forever damned. 

That is one step. What is the next ? Why, if men have any 
natural goodness in them — any of their own goodness in them 
— any merit, any virtue they themselves have earned, then they 
are not totally depraved. There goes another very large and 
important stone out of the arch. 

Total depravity gone, the " fall of man " at the very worst is 
heredity, not the loss of his primitive nature of holiness, not 
the plunge into a corrupt nature taught in our theologies. 
There goes out another stone ! 

Think what it means to lose that theological plunge called 
" The fall of man ! " Why, there is no more use for the Devil, 
and he is a wonderfully important factor in evangelical the- 
ology. The laws of nature are sufficient for all hereditary evils ; 
it requires a Devil to produce the "fall." No fall, no Devil. 

Well, without the Devil, what ? What ! Why, think of it ! 
Think of it till you see how perfectly logical it is — without the 
Devil, no atonement. What is the death of Christ for in the 
evangelical scheme? To undo the work of heredity? Oh, no. 
Education will do that — mental and moral education. The laws 
of nature underlie moral education to lift men up, just as they 
lift up a crabapple into a pippin when you cultivate the tree. 
Hereditary depravity is canceled by hereditary evolution, by 
culture. No atonement required for that. Atonement is to 
cancel the work of the Devil. No Devil, no atonement ; and 
from being the great expiatory sacrifice, Christ becomes our 
moral teacher, our religious inspiration. 

The theological atonement gone, what next ? Why, surely, 



UNI TA RIANISM. 4 9 

the Deity of Christ is a needless fiction. Why has the theology 
of all ages demanded that Christ be a God ? Because, it said, 
no man and no angel was great enough, important enough, 
to be accepted by the Devil as hostage for the human race. 

The Devil had captured humanity. He bargained with the 
Creator to set us free if the Divine Son of God would humble 
himself and die the shameful death of the cross before his 
Satanic Majesty. Christ must be a Deity to be accepted as 
hostage. If there be no Devil, of course there is no theological 
need of Christ's divinity ; and so, one person of the Trinity is 
lost. 

There never was any ground of belief in the Holy Spirit as a 
person, other than the words of Jesus. Jesus said, " I will send 
the Comforter— the spirit of truth." If Jesus were God, we 
may think that he meant to send a God. If Jesus were a man, 
we must think that he meant the spirit of truth — a truth-loving 
disposition with which he inspired men. Two persons of the 
Trinity are gone; and it was by that system of unbroken and 
irrefutable logic that Channing, having denied eternal punish- 
ment, on the ground that man did not deserve it, must and did 
become a Unitarian. 

What is the Unitarian thought of Jesus ? You will find it 
nowhere else quite so nobly put as in Channing's review of 
Walter Scott's life of Napoleon. He says there are three types 
of greatness: greatness in action, of which Napoleon was 
chief ; greatness of intellect, in which Plato was pre-eminent ; 
moral greatness, of which Jesus was the supreme example. 

Channing was not a churchman, not a partisan, not an organ- 
izer, not a debater. He was a teacher, of the judicial mould. 
He saw all sides of all questions. Above everything he was 
humanitarian. Not ten per cent, of his writings are theologi- 
cal. His life-long text was moral progress. He loved peace 
and equality and refinement. His judgments were gentle be- 
cause he could appreciate the case of the opposition. His 
great soul yearned for slave-owner as well as slave, for liquor- 
seller as well as drinker, for monopolist as well as tramp. His 
sympathies were universal. He could not hate anybody. 

He stood with Clay in the great hope to do away with slavery 
by purchase or by compromise. Slavery was abolished in Eng- 



30 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

land and in the northern states without war. In the days of 
Jackson he saw that war was coming, but he believed that it 
might be averted. He foresaw just as clearly the temperance 
fight and the political power of rum ; and he plead, year after 
year, that the new States of the west might be constitutionally 
protected against it. He saw the coming battle between labor 
and capital and he plead for laws, away back in the thirties 
when there were but three or four millionaires in America, to 
prohibit the enormity of land grants and great charter privi- 
leges. He would have kept coal and oil and gold out of the 
hands of a few supreme financial tyrants. What a prophet he 
was, outlining our present social struggles more than fifty years 
ago, when all the churches were asleep and dreaming of 
theology ! 

Out of his great humanitarianism, too, came our American 
literature. Just look at their names : Bryant, Longfellow, 
Holmes, Lowell, Emerson, Whittier, W. H. Channing, Ripley, 
Alcott, Henry Ware, Sr. and Jr., Prof. Noyes, Pres. Walker, W T m. 
Alger, Horatio Alger, Theodore Parker, Starr King, Sears, 
Peabody, Everett, Margaret Fuller, Mrs. Child, E. E. Hale, 
James Freeman Clarke, Motley, Prescott, Bellows, Brook Her- 
ford, Frothingham, Savage, Robert Collier, Appleby, Conway, 
Crooker, Chadwick, Blake, — and these are but samples. 

If you put upon your book-shelves all the American books 
that are worthy to be called "literature," half of them will be 
Unitarian. Channing's grand humanitarianism was the inspir- 
ation of it all — and it is all rationally and harmoniously devout. 
With honoring man, they have come to reverence God more 
truly. 



THEISM. 51 



THEISM, OR, THE REVOLT FROM THE 
MA TERIA LIS TIC RE VOL T 

John Fisk divides the history of religious thought into two 
great eras — the Pre-Darwinite and the Post-Darwinite. He 
makes the doctrine of evolution to be the one great line of 
cleavage that separates all the old philosophies of religion 
from everything that is and is to come in the way of religious 
philosophy. Instead of making any scientific distinctions be- 
tween Protestant and Catholic, between Christian and Jewish, 
between our Bible and the Bibles of all other great religions, 
Fisk sees, as Max Miiller sees, as every student of comparative 
religion sees, that all pre-Darwinite theologies and churches 
have, philosophically, the same basis. That basis is the univer- 
sal belief in the miraculous interference of the gods with the 
established laws and forces of nature. 

These various religions of the world differ widely in their 
specific developments. Some of them, as the Jewish and Mo- 
hammedan, rest in the idea of one god ; some, as the Persian, 
postulate two gods ; some, as the Christian, teach, practically, 
three gods ; some, as the Egyptian and the Brahminic, evolved 
a triad of great gods, with multitudes of lesser deities ; some, 
as the Greek and Roman, built a pantheon, with greater deities 
by the dozen and smaller deities by the hundred. Concerning 
the nature and power and wisdom and goodness of the gods, 
there were theories and dogmas ad libitum. What Fisk holds 
is that all the old beliefs in supernaturalism, notwithstanding 
their various forms of development, show simply the differ- 
ences of feature that may exist in brothers of one family. Get 
down to the foundations and ask a Methodist, a Swedenborgian, 
an old-time Universalist, a Catholic, a Jew, a Mohammedan, 
an Egyptian, a Chinaman, why he has any religion at all, why 
he believes in the existence of any God at all, and from all these 
pre-Darwinite worshipers you will get the same reply. From 
about the year i860 backward through all nations, races, the- 



5 2 PHA SES OF RELIGION IN A M ERICA 

ologies, churches, to the primitive fetish worshiper of ten 
thousand or a hundred thousand years ago, there is one reply, 
one reason given, one thought in every mind, one basis for the 
religions of the whole world. That basis was the common 
belief in miraculous interference with the laws and forces 
of nature. Everybody believed in miracles, and upon the basis 
of miracles they believed in God or the gods. Without mira- 
cles they believed nothing. 

Before the time of Darwin men did not give to miracles the 
accommodating definitions that are become so popular in these 
latter days. When Wesley or Luther spake of a miracle he did 
not mean simply a ''wonder," a "something that we do not 
understand," a " higher law with whose action we are not yet 
acquainted." In that sense the telegraph is a miracle to every 
child, and hypnotism is a miracle to most grown people. Wesley 
and Luther had no bargain with science which they veiled under 
the specious phrase of higher law. We have many preachers 
to-day who keep clutch with traditionalism by affirming their 
adherence to the word " miracle," and who stand in with the 
scientific element of the congregation by defining out of that 
word all the meaning which the entire history of religious 
thought has put into it. They believe in miracle as a per- 
fectly natural thing that holds its place a little above our heads. 
It is a rare thing, a force that seldom comes into play. The 
natural is the usual. A miracle is the unusual usual. Jesus 
raised dead people to life. He did it by " higher law." There 
is a natural law by which, if we only knew how to work it, we 
too might call forth all the dead of our cemeteries ! I must 
confess that I find it more difficult to believe in the existence 
of such a law than to accept an old-fashioned, supernatural, 
orthodox miracle, boldly and above board. Again they tell us, 
there is a law of matter, a physical law, by which water can be 
instantly converted into wine. It is a very occult law, an ex- 
tremely high law, and Jesus is the only man who ever knew about 
it, and he kept the secret ; but there is a natural law by the 
operation of which, if modern scientists only had the scientific 
knowledge Jesus had, they could turn the whole Atlantic 
ocean, instantly, not into something that looks and tastes 
like it, but veritably into the fermented, intoxicating juice of 



THEISM. B3 

grapes. Of course it is a splendid thing for the human race, 
morally speaking, that our scientists are deficient in this very- 
high grade of knowledge. Of course it is somewhat remark- 
able, if Jesus were such an expert scientist, that he did not 
manifest his genius in some more practical way — did not men- 
tion the circulation of the blood, or the heliocentric theory of 
the universe, or the laws of gravitation, or make a few obser- 
vations on chemistry and machinery, by the toilsome discovery 
of which the world's civilization has been enhanced. Strange, 
indeed, that a man who knew more science than all the other 
scientists of the world combined should keep the secret of that 
knowledge, with which he might have lifted humanity up 
through twenty centuries of progress in a single generation ! 
It is passing strange that a man of this supreme ability, a 
genius and a teacher who could have anticipated and 
immeasurably outstripped all the discoveries and inventions 
of the nineteenth century — stranger than truth, which is 
stranger than fiction, that such a man should content himself 
to use that mighty knowledge in supplying more wine to a 
company of people who were already drunk ! More strange 
than all is the imagination in the brains of our natural-miracle 
advocates that there really exists a law by which the Atlantic 
Ocean may be instantly changed into the juice of grapes. 

Until a little while ago this higher law makeshift never oc- 
curred to anybody. The pre-Darwinites did not consider a 
miracle as a natural, but as an unnatural, supernatural, contra- 
natural event. If the dead could have been raised naturally 
Wesley and Luther, as theologians, would not have cared one 
whit for the fact. It would have had no religious import or 
meaning to their minds. If they heeded such an occurrence 
at all it would be to protest that Jesus did not make use of any 
scientific method at the tomb of Lazarus. They would care- 
fully discriminate between the natural and the contra-natural 
resurrections. The only reason why a miracle had any re- 
ligious import to them was found in its unnaturalness. All con- 
ceivable wonders that were according to law, lower or higher, 
would have been to them no proof whatever of the existence 
of God — proof simply of somebody's great scientific wisdom. 
The only kind of miracle they cared anything about was the 



54 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

miracle which is impossible to nature — the action of a force 
which does not exist in nature — a method of procedure which 
is contrary to and in violation of all the laws of nature. If 
any man had risen up in Luther's time to explain a Bible 
miracle by the action of higher law, he would have been de- 
nounced as an atheist just as quickly and just as logically as 
if he denied that any Bible miracle was ever worked. The 
pith and point of the argument to the pre-Darwinites was, not 
the fact, but the manner of the fact. Water turned to wine, 
and lepers cured, and dead raised to life, and worlds and uni- 
verses brought into existence, were no evidence of a God, un- 
less these things were done tmnaturally. 

Why so ? Because they thought of God as existing outside 
of nature. They thought of nature as a something, almost a 
someone, which stood in its separate integrity, independent of 
God, having its own laws and forces, its own life and progress, 
its own wisdom and creative genius. They thought of nature 
as infinite power and regularity, sufficient into itself for all the 
properties of matter and all the action of forces and all the 
workings of life. They thought of God as external to nature, 
as coming into nature now and then — a conqueror into alien 
territory — assuming dictatorship for a brief season, stopping 
nature's machinery, overturning its work, breaking its connec- 
tions, injecting a totally different kind of force for the hour, 
doing something that nature has no power to do and no means 
of doing, producing some result for which nature could possibly 
make no provision, adopting a method which is exactly the re- 
verse of all natural methods. They believed that God did this 
occasionally just to show man from time to time that He still 
existed, that .He had not entirely abandoned the universe and 
forsaken humanity. To their minds, all the grandeurs of 
nature, and its glories and its marvels, were no proof of the 
existence of God. He proved his existence only by these oc- 
casional visitations of law-violating force recorded in the Bible 
and in church history. To explain these by a higher law theory 
would have been to rob men of all proof and leave them in 
materialistic despair. You are thinking of " Paley's watch ;" 
but Paley's entire scheme of natural religion was only a but- 
tress, not a bridge. His mind could not have crossed on that 



THEISM. 35 

from the material to the spiritual realm. Given a miraculous 
revelation, and design became corroborative, but miracles 
alone could span the stream of doubt. How true is this may- 
be seen in the frantic efforts of Paley's theological descend- 
ants to deny evolution, and their wearisome iteration that 
science binds God and fetters him in his own laws. You are 
thinking of Greek philosophy ; and I do not forget that mag- 
nificent attempt along the lines where present thought is trav- 
eling ; but it was a philosophy, an attempt, which the religion 
of the age throttled, perverted and destroyed. 

Once more let me rep.eat that the pre-Darwinite religions 
depended upon law-violating miracles alone as their theistic 
evidence ; therefore all bibles are filled and all religious his- 
tory is flooded with contranaturalism. The chief work of 
all apologists and the supreme genius of all defenders of the 
faith were called forth by the universal demand to substantiate 
the arbitrariness, the opposite of lawfulness, in miracles. To 
this dav a minister is not thought so extreme for anything else 
he may say or do as for denying the miraculous. It has come 
to pass, however, that a man can deny all the meaning that 
the whole history of the world has put into them, and still 
keep his place, by vowing allegiance to the word " miracles." 
Mark Twain said of a certain evil in a certain society that it 
existed only in fact, not in name. 

Not so with our fathers. It was the fact of law-violation, 
and nothing short of it, and no dickering with science, that 
constituted a miracle for them. The churches made their 
own definitions, enforced their opinions, and the doubters, 
scientists, students of nature, acquiesced. In the olden time 
it scarcely occurred to the men of science to take the case out 
of the hands of the preachers, and suggest new methods of 
belief and a different kind of evidence from that which all 
churches claimed as the only evidence. The churches said, 
" If we can substantiate the law-violating miracle we may 
keep our religious belief ; if we lose the law-violating miracle 
all religion is gone." The scientists, drilled from infancy in 
that dictum, acquiesced and said, " So be it." 

What was the result ? The great materialistic revolt — a 
world full of utterly irreligious thinkers. It was not because 



SB PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

men wanted to deny the existence of God and immortality and 
the human soul. Every man wants to believe in these. More 
than he wants anything and everything else, he wants to be- 
lieve in these. On the miracle foundation, however, when men 
studied science, they found it impossible to believe in these. If 
miracles were the only evidence, they were without evidence. 
Against all the yearning of their hearts, against every protest 
of love, against their insatiable hunger to live and all their 
shivering dread of annihilation, they were driven irresistibly 
to deny the law-violating miracle. They accepted the dictum 
of the church, that by such denial they denied God and their 
own souls. Talk about martyrdom ! There has never been such 
martyrdom in human history as this denial of the world's hope 
— of their own hope — in the minds of scholars. The incontro- 
vertible facts of science drove them to it. They simply come to 
believe that everything that is done in this universe, everything 
that has been done or that can be done, is according to natural 
law. All the religious teachers said to them, " That is materi- 
alism ;" and with a bravery, with a self-sacrifice, with a moral 
heroism, with a mental honesty and sense of honor, never ex- 
celled, impossible to excel, the scientists bowed their heads and 
replied, " So be it ; good-by to all human hope ; come death, 
annihilation, but the facts of science compel us to this denial 
of miracles." It were not difficult for one who holds the 
Christian faith to suffer martyrdom. It were nothing remark- 
able for one who perfectly believes in immortality to give up a 
few years of this life at the call of duty ; but for one to give 
up his childhood belief in immortal life at the call of mental 
integrity partakes of the sublime. 

Please understand me that the scientific, psychological, so- 
called miracles of these modern years have nothing to do with 
the case. The wonders of hypnotism, mind-reading, telepathy, 
mental healing — if all that has been claimed were demonstrat- 
ed — have no bearing on the question at issue. Suppose that 
Jesus could tell men what they were thinking about ; could 
tell a Samaritan woman her secret history ; could with perfect 
confidence direct his disciples from Bethlehem to Jerusalem to 
prepare the passover, assuring them that they would meet a 
man in the street bearing a pitcher of water who would tell 



THEISM. 37 

them where to go; suppose he could heal the sick by his word, 
even at a distance, and with certainty command a mother home 
to her daughter who should be found well. All this is claimed 
by modern science of the mind. If Jesus exercised a soul- 
force, which tens of thousands believe is exercised to-day, 
however startling it may be to physical science and however 
staggering to our credulity, it is nothing to the argument, foi 
all of that is natural in the mind-world, they tell us ; just as 
natural as gravitation and electricity in the matter-world. 

The scientists were impelled along the path of natural law. 
They found that more and more things, once supposed to be 
miraculous interferences, were in reality under the dominance 
of law. When you go back to ancient times you find that peo- 
ple had no conception of law whatever. They thought there 
was a spirit, a ghost, an angel, a demon, in everything — a god to 
guide the sun across the roadway of the sky, a spirit in every 
tree to make it grow, a ghost in the stomach to carry on the 
work of digestion. By noting the regularity with which some 
of the most common events happened, people came at last to 
have a dim conception of law. They came to feel that it was 
a law for the sun to rise in the east every morning, and gradu- 
ally they said, " Nature does that." They came to feel that it 
was a law for the tides to ebb and flow, and they said, " Nature 
does that." As fast as any series of happenings took shape in 
their minds as being under law, they said, " Nature does this, or 
that." 

The progress of all human knowledge has been simply this 
— to find that more and more things are under law. For a 
long time after men realized that the heat of the sun and the 
light of the stars and the motions of the earth and the growth 
of trees and the flowing of rivers and the heaving of tides were 
under law — things done by nature — they still said, " The 
weather is not subject to law; there at least God can show 
his hand. He sends rain or withholds frost in answer to 
prayer." By and by it was known that the weather also — the 
lightest film of a cloud that floats in the summer sky — is as 
truly under law as the rising and the setting of the sun. Then 
they said, "Pestilence and earthquakes are left." No: it is 
shown that they too are under law. " Well ; sickness and cure 



S8 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

and death, in certain, cases ?" No : law reigns everywhere. 
That is the dictum of science. Even in thought, in feeling. Even 
in the growth of government, of religion, everywhere law reigns. 
Nature rules and overrules in the armies of heaven and among 
the inhabitants of earth. That is the doctrine of science. 
Well, what is the conclusion ? Atheism f Materialism? That 
was the conclusion twenty-five years ago. Nature does every- 
thing. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, left for any out- 
side god to do. That was the inevitable conclusion. If the 
Deity had his existence external to nature, there was nothing 
for him to do, and He had never broken through the eternal 
order to show his hand. He was absolutely the useless and 
the unknowable. 

For a brief while the thinkers of the world halted there. 
But the mind of man, and especially the heart of man, could 
not remain there. The wise began to say, " Nevertheless, we 
believe in God." Then, as by the flash of a new-created sun, 
men said, " We believe in God more than ever before." By a 
sudden change of front men saw a universe of light where it 
had seemed was eternal darkness. From the glimmerings of 
the old Deistic philosophy they turned away to the broad noon 
of Theism. How was this wonderful transformation accom- 
plished ? Did they go back to a blind faith in miracles? Not 
at all. Did they give up one whit of their conviction that all 
things are under law? Not at all. What have they done in 
these few years to gain a higher and nobler and sweeter faith 
than they lost ? The simplest thing you could imagine. They 
have substituted the word God for the word nature, the thought 
of God for the thought of nature — will for fate, personality for 
a machine. Nature does everything? Oh, no! God does 
everything. Nature is but the scientific word for God. The 
infinite force and the infinite wisdom in this universe are God's 
force and wisdom. The infinite lives are the quickening of his 
life. Evolution is his method. Laws are his absolute and 
perfect arbitrariness. Invariability is the Divine freedom. 
Feeling themselves pushed off to the edges and fringes of 
creation for their proof of God, and at last pushed out into 
nothingness, the minds of investigators returned to the centre 
of being and claimed law, instead of law-violation, as the evi- 



THErSM. 59 

dence of God. They laid hold boldly on the infinite naturalness 
instead of longer squinting about the nooks and crannies for 
some speck of unnaturalism, as proof of the Divine presence. 
Never was there such a comment on that text, " The stone 
which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner." 
Ask a theistic scientist why he believes in God, and he will re- 
ply, " Because the universe is under a system of perfect laws." 
It would not occur to him to say that he believes in God be- 
cause a law is occasionally broken or fails to work. The only 
thing that would make him doubt the existence of God would 
be to find that sometimes a law does not work, or that the 
action of any natural force deviated, or that any particle of 
matter had lost some of its properties. If he should discover a 
star that was not subject to gravitation, or a piece of iron that 
would not oxydize, or any living thing that was without par- 
entage, his faith in God might well be shaken. Anything un- 
natural would destroy the unity of things, would divide crea- 
tion and suggest a doubt of the Creator. Regularity, not 
chance ; order, not patch-work ; power and wisdom and life and 
progress evolving from within, not occasional repairs made by 
a carpenter — these are his proofs of God. 

Suppose, that in Central Africa, Stanley should have come 
upon a city with buildings and appointments as noble as Lon- 
don or Paris can boast ; with banks and wharfs and factories 
and libraries and galleries and theatres and churches and 
homes ; with telegraphs and telephones and electric lights and 
stores of as rich and fine merchandise as was ever seen ; with 
clean streets and perfect drainage and wires in the sub-way — 
but with no people in sight : what do you suppose would have 
been his conclusion? That the wonderful city was a product 
of blind force ? That it was a freak of impersonal nature ? 
Hardly. He would have said, " There are people about here, 
in cellar or garret, or they have all gone to the country for a 
day, or they have some magic power of making themselves in- 
visible ; but there are people about here ; and they are a wise 
and cultured people." Suppose you had been with him and 
that you had said, " Now, Mr. Stanley, what evidence have 
you that there are, or ever have been, cultured people here- 
abouts?" Don't you think he would have considered you a 



60 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA 

very stupid jester, or would, in turn, have questioned your san- 
ity ? Then suppose you had begun to look around, and among 
a thousand watches of most perfect and delicate make you 
found one with a flaw in the dial ; you found a cracked pane of 
glass and a broken violin string and a door with a rusty hinge ; 
and you come back triumphantly exclaiming, " Now, I believe 
there are people hereabouts. Not all the scientific principles 
they have obeyed, but the few mistakes of which they are still 
guilty, are my evidence that this wonderful city is the work of 
men." Stanley's astonishment would surely have been diverted 
from the city to you. Just about that, however, has been the 
genius of theology. It has peeped about through the universe 
for cracked panes of glass and broken violin strings, and not 
finding any, it says there is no God. Not the infinite uses of 
law, but legends of small disturbances of the general order, 
here and there, have delighted its vision. Not the regular mo- 
tion and life-giving power of the sun for a million years, but 
the story that he paused one afternoon that Joshua might have 
another hour of daylight in which to kill some men whose 
property he wanted ; not the wonders of vegetable growth 
which cover the mountains with forests and fill the valleys 
with fruits and flowers through countless ages, but a slender 
tradition of the blasting of one poor little fig tree — these have 
been the proud arguments of theology. 

Theism accepts the universe as the city that God hasbuilded. 
The presence of worlds and stars, the working of infinite 
forces, the harmony and unity of creation, the flow of eternal 
life through all the forms of matter — everything is evidence of 
him. The one phrase which adequately expresses our sense of 
infinite power, infinite wisdom, infinite extent, infinite life, is 
just that long-hated phrase, " Natural law." That phrase, 
therefore, is the exponent of Deity ; gateway of endless and 
measureless revelation. 



SPIRITUALISM. 61 



SPIRITUALISM, OR, THE RELIGION OF 
DEMONSTRA TION. 

Evangelicalism preaches faith. Perhaps half the sermons 
of the entire Christian pulpit are more or less emphatically 
upon that theme. Ninety per cent, of all the prayer-meeting 
and conference-meeting talks are about the powers and won- 
ders and satisfactions of faith; and yet, poor, inconsistent mor- 
tals that we are, nobody is satisfied with faith. Those who 
make most of it are most emphatic in their appeal to evidence. 
Everybody wants proof. Mind and heart alike yearn for de- 
monstration. The people who cease not to cry, " Believe, be- 
lieve," turn immediately about and declare, "The resurrection 
of Christ proves the life beyond." Aye, then, they are not de- 
pending on faith at all, but on what they consider as evidence. 
Criticise the evidence, and you will find that the church is 
ready to fight for it. It will patiently endure almost any abuse 
of its faith, but it will fly to arms when you lay hand on its evi- 
dence. There were angels talking with shepherds ; angels at 
the tomb ; angels at the ascension ; there were Moses and Elijah 
on the mount of transfiguration ; there were Lazarus and the 
widow's son and the ruler's daughter returned from death ; 
there was Jesus, alive, after his passion, seen and talked with 
and handled— by these alleged appearances the church claims 
to know there is life beyond. The church is not ready to part 
with these and trust its faith. 

Why does the church go on preaching faith if it knows? 
" That which a man knows he does not hope for." If faith is 
satisfactory, why should people wish to know ? The satisfied 
mind makes no struggle. If God meant that we should 
grasp eternal life by faith, why did He work so many demon- 
strations ? If He meant us to depend on demonstration our 
business is to get at the facts, not to foster credulity. We 
should depend on one thing or the other. We should seek the 
outward evidence, the physical manifestation, the facts which 



62 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

appeal to sense ; or we should rely upon the convictions, pro- 
phecies, intuitions of the soul. We might do both. The re- 
ligious world is doing neither. This is the serious, or comical, 
truth about it — the churches accept the future life on biblical 
evidence ; and then they accept biblical evidence on faith. They 
believe in immortality because Moses and Elijah and Lazarus 
and Jesus were seen alive after they died. That is the evidence ; 
but it is evidence that must not be examined ; you mast simply 
accept it ; and you must close your ears to any criticism which 
proposes to sift and weigh the character of it. There is the 
office of faith — in the unquestioning acceptance of the alleged 
demonstration. That would be a curious proceeding in a court 
of law. Suppose that a man is on trial for murder. A witness 
swears, " I saw the murder committed ; the prisoner is guilty." 
Would the case rest there, and sentence of death be pro- 
nounced ? Wouldn't somebody insist on knowing who and what 
the witness is, his reputation for truthfulness, whether he 
could have any personal interest in making away with the pris- 
oner ? Wouldn't the counsel for defence cross-question him 
as to the time and place and manner of the assault, oblige him 
to prove that he himself was not five hundred or five miles 
away from the scene of the crime, at the alleged hour? 
Wouldn't it be a peculiar judge who should cut short this 
cross-examination with the order that a witness should be put 
to no test — that his bare word was sufficient ? It would hardly 
do in criminal courts to receive evidence on faith ; but when 
any scholar begins to cross-question these biblical proofs of 
immortality, the church pounces angrily upon him. Can you 
think of but one reason why ? If a lawyer is perfectly satisfied 
that his witness has stated the case correctly, he is not afraid 
of cross-examination. 

I have brought out these points simply to show how dearly 
the Christian world loves a demonstration. The evidence of a 
future life afforded by the raising of the dead it will cling to, 
though it be pushed to the extremity of protecting its witnesses 
from examination. 

The evangelical churches, which are so relentless in their 
devotion to physical proof of the life beyond, ought to be a 
little more charitable toward the Spiritualists, who are trying 



SPIRITUALISM. 63 

to do in this age what the churches declare was done many 
centuries ago in this work of demonstrating man's other-world 
existence. One would naturally expect the orthodox church to 
give Spiritualists an undivided support of sympathy and good 
will. What a marvelous confirmation of the Bible if Spirit- 
ualism be true ! If it can be proven beyond a peradventure 
that departed spirits come back and show themselves in what 
appear to be material forms, how grandly that would pave the 
way for an easy belief in the after-death appearances of Jesus ! 
We have in the classics the story of the siege of Troy. The 
world was coming to think of it as a myth. Dr. Schleimann 
made his excavations and the world rejoiced, and said : " Now 
we have more confidence in history." The churches them- 
selves are sending men to explore every old Bible country for 
confirmatory evidence, that such a city as Babylon and such a 
man as Nebuchednezzar existed. One would naturally expect 
the evangelical churches to hail Spiritualism with rapture as 
the long-sought confirmation of their most deeply-loved be- 
liefs. The natural expectation, however, is doomed to a very 
harsh disappointment. Spiritualists have no other such ene- 
mies in the world as the evangelical churches. Why ? I can 
imagine but one reason why. Spiritualists are not evangelical. 
Their communications from the other shore do not accord with 
traditional theology. They proclaim that people enter the 
next world as they leave this; that character is continuous; 
that happiness or misery depends on what people are, not on 
what they believe ; that the future is a realm of progress — from 
bad to good, from good to better. Spiritualists renounce the 
doctrines of the Trinity and Atonement and salvation by faith 
and endless punishment. That is why their confirmatory evi- 
dence is not accepted. Prejudice against them, as unevan- 
gelical, has become enmity to their work. How deeply this 
prejudice has entered the public mind one must, pause and 
consider to appreciate. We have the story of Jesus' bodily 
resurrection. We have not the word of a single eye-witness. 
The earliest record we possess of the event was written at least 
half a century after the event — in an age of credulity, when 
such a thing as criticism or the careful sifting of evidence was 
unknown. The records we have are singularly and seriously at 



64 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

variance with each other; but that testimony, floating down 
through eighteen centuries, sinking as it does into perfect 
obscurity in the early stages, so that no scholarship can deter 
mine what changes may have been made in the text during the 
second or third century — that evidence is received without 
question. Here are good people and true, your neighbors and 
friends and business associates, hundreds of them, thousands 
of them, who testify that last week or last night they saw, 
heard, touched, the materialized spirit of a dead friend ; and 
that testimony is thrust aside with a compassionate sneer as 
unworthy of a moment's consideration. We have ten thou- 
sand times the evidence for modern materializations that we 
have for any biblical reappearance. We scoff at this, and 
sacredly believe that. The power of prejudice is truly won- 
derful. 

It is often asked why Spiritualism is a thing so modern. The 
answer is that until recently the world was satisfied with 
biblical demonstration. Everybody believed what the church 
said — that of old the spirits did appear on earth, and the pop- 
ular heart rested in that dictum of the church. Then materi- 
alistic science and destructive criticism came upon us like a 
Conemaugh flood and carried us away from our faith-homes 
and stranded us upon the barren shoals of negation. All 
classes of religious folk set to work to battle or avoid Mate- 
rialism. The orthodox world met the difficulty in a blind, 
blundering way; but with honest and motherly intention to 
save its hopes. It said, " Children, you must not read what 
the Materialists write. You must not allow yourselves to think 
upon the arguments they make. You must reverently close 
your ears and keep saying rapidly, under-breath, ' I do be- 
lieve.' " The Liberal Religionists looked the facts of the 
Materialists squarely in the face and said, " But is there not a 
spiritual way of interpreting these facts ?" When Materi- 
alism showed that the earth came into existence, not by cre- 
ation but by evolution, these men of broader spiritual genius 
said, "Well, what of it? Where did evolution come from? 
Evolution, just as much as creation, requires a God to make it 
work. It is only a different, a grander and more worthy view 
of the Divine method. Thank you, gentlemen, for the sug- 



SPIRITUALISM. 68 

gestion." So, with a wider philosophy, the Liberals have 
turned science to account, have harnessed its forces to their 
faith and reverence. When Materialism had pretty thoroughly 
settled it that these bodies of ours are not to be resurrected, 
the Liberals began a new study of our souls, and they have 
found such power, such measureless life, such divine possi- 
bility and prophecy in them as to reply, " Very well, let the 
body go ; the soul can live on without it." In this general 
conflict with Materialism the Spiritualists have taken a hand. 
They, too, have gone into the battle and have done execution 
according to their genius. It must be confessed that they 
have been the bravest soldiers on the field. Orthodoxy has 
lingered far in the rear and exhorted its soldiers to run away, 
to keep beyond sight and hearing of the enemy's guns. Its 
hope was not to conquer the foe, but to preserve its own camp. 
The Liberals have skirted the edges of the battle-field and 
tried to capture the enemy's ordnance by a philosophic ma- 
ncevre. The Spiritualists accepted boldly and without equiv- 
ocation the guage of battle. They marched straight up in the 
centre of the field and leveled their guns at the citadel. They 
said, " We will meet you in the arena of the most careful 
research. We are ready to settle this controversy with scien- 
tific demonstrations. You undertake to show that there is no 
such thing as a spirit outside of a human body. We under- 
take to show that there is. Let the facts decide. We will go 
with you into the laboratory and watch your experiments. You 
come with us into the seance and watch our experiments. Put 
us to every possible test. If we are frauds, expose and denounce 
us. If we show you things that your material science cannot 
account for, be honest with us; confess the fact." That is fair 
and manly, and yet there are only a few scientists who stand up 
in soldierly fashion and fight the battle out. Far too many 
scientists reply, " We have our own demonstrations of the phy- 
sical sort, and they are sufficient. You people are all crazy." 
Science learned that kind of reply from the church. Your gen- 
uinely traditional scientist is about as dogmatic, about as big- 
oted, about as pompously ignorant of what the other side has 
to offer, as your genuinely traditional bishop or cardinal him- 
self. 



66 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

A few scientists have examined the alleged facts of Spir- 
itualism. Some of them have been tremendously shaken in 
their materialistic dogmatism. Mr. Wallace, one of the most 
illustrious thinkers and experimenters of the age, companion of 
Darwin, who shares with Darwin the honor of the evolution 
philosophy, is a brilliant example of those who went to dis- 
prove and remained to proclaim. Some years ago Mr. Wallace 
took the broad stand that science should include all facts. If 
Spiritualism presented any seeming facts, it was the scientist's 
duty to examine them. In that mood he entered the Society 
for Psychical Research, which was composed of eminent schol- 
ars of many professions. Through several years these gen- 
tlemen have conducted a careful, analytical, thoroughly scien- 
tific investigation of alleged spiritualistic phenomena. Their 
reports of what they have seen and heard and established by 
competent testimony form several hundred pages of very 
interesting reading. It is not quite to be expected that the 
extreme parties are satisfied with these investigations. There 
are Spiritualists who claim that the Society for Psychical Re- 
search has not entered heartily and sympathetically into an 
examination of seances. There are Materialists who doubt the 
thoroughness and absolute reliability of many of the reported 
observations. As on-lookers, reporters, unprejudiced jurors, 
we shall be safe in concluding, I think, that the reports present 
a series of facts, however they are to be interpreted, that are 
reasonably well established. After deducting all that may be 
due to tricks and self-deception, and leaving a wide margin for 
the frailty of eyes and ears and instruments, it still does seem 
that a solid body of most peculiar and prophetic phenomena 
remains. 

If you wish to follow up this investigation, read either the 
Society's reports or Mr. Wallace's resume of the Society's 
reports in the Arena for January and February, 1891. Mr. 
Wallace groups the facts obtained under five separate heads. 
He uses the words " phantom " and " apparition," not wishing 
to prejudice his articles by the use of such words as " spirit '' 
or " person." He shows : — 

First. That, in hundreds of instances, " apparitions " have 
been seen — objects that looked like people without physical 



SPIRITUALISM. 67 

bodies. The " apparitions " have been seen by two, three, 
twenty persons at once, in the dark, in broad daylight, in 
houses, in open fields, when " mediums " were present, when 
" mediums " were not present. 

Secondly. These " apparitions " have been seen to move 
about. For instance, one particular " phantom " was seen by a 
person in front of a house ; a moment later it was seen by 
another person in the house ; a moment later by a third person 
at the rear of the house, just as a man who walked into and 
through and beyond the house would have been seen by those 
three persons who were so situated that they could not see 
each other. 

Thirdly. These " phantoms," on many occasions, have been 
seen by animals, cats, dogs, horses, which manifested every 
sign of surprise, fear, recognition, that they would show in the 
presence of real objects or people. 

Fourthly. These " phantoms," in countless instances, have 
produced effects on material objects, opening and shutting 
doors, moving furniture, lifting and carrying people, &c. 

Fifthly. These " apparitions " have been photographed. 

Well, here are the facts, if human evidence is not all untrust- 
worthy for that order of facts. I am free to confess that I am 
not quite ready to say, without hesitation, and a reserved " if," 
here are the facts. I am just as free to confess that such an 
array of evidence would leave no doubt at all in my mind con- 
cerning a different order of facts. Perhaps that is prejudice, 
and if so I am ashamed of it. With crime and vice I feel that 
prejudice is a legitimate cause for shame. So mightily does 
this evidence press upon my mind that I must treat the phe- 
nomena, notwithstanding my own hesitation, as real and estab- 
lished until disproved. This weight of the testimony shifts 
the responsibility, of establishing a negative, to the opposition. 

Granting the facts, how are they to be explained ? Are they 
the work of disembodied spirits, or the work of our own 
spirits ? Is there in the human mind an unconscious power 
that is capable of producing these phenomena ? Is there in the 
soul of man an undiscovered force, subtler than electricity or 
life itself, which, under proper conditions, can operate to lift 
physical weights without the application of any material agent, 



68 PHA SES OF RELIGION IN A M ERICA 

even the touch of a finger ? One may conceive that there is. 
But could this subtle force or spiritual substance go out from 
the mind and assume a shape that other people, that animals, 
will see ? Or, may it be that other people, that animals, are 
unconsciously hypnotized by us so that they see what we see 
or imagine ? One may dimly appreciate that either is the case. 
Can this spiritual substance go out from our minds and assume 
a form that may be photographed ? I confess that is a stag- 
gering proposition. An out-going soul-force must gather mat- 
ter about itself, or itself transform into matter, before the 
camera would act upon it. But, before a disembodied spirit 
could be photographed, it would have to do the same. If 
either is possible, the other may be. If one could only know 
what matter is, or what it is not, the problem might not be so 
tremendous. If we could really grasp the remarkable saying of 
Faraday that an atom of matter is a point of force ; if we 
could follow a thought of God downward and backward 
through the eternities until we saw it transform into a nodule 
of physical substance ; if we could understand the sublime 
principle that the external universe thus proceeds from the 
Eternal Spirit, we might arouse to the fact that soul-substance, 
or force, or essence, can, under proper conditions, materialize. 
What a world we could fill with the things we don't know ! 
We are not, however, to deny or scoff at a fact because it is 
inexplicable. 

The alleged " communications " from " spirits " constitute 
one of the strongest arguments against Spiritualism. I have 
read hundreds of them, but not one that seemed in any literary 
or intellectual sense above the possibilities of the "medium." 
Spiritualists are par excellence the teachers of the doctrine of 
progress beyond death. I have read scores of alleged essays, 
poems, discourses, from Shakespeare and St. Paul and Soc- 
rates, after these hundreds and thousands of years of progress, 
which were not half as worthy as those men could write when 
they were in their 'teens. I have never had the fortune to read 
anything from the other side that could for a moment be com- 
pared with the average literature, not to speak of the works of 
genius, of this poor undeveloped world. The claim which is 
often made that a " medium " who writes a barely respectable 



SPIRITUA LISM. 6 » 

little poem is herself an entirely ignorant person, quite inca- 
pable of doing even so much — that claim is fatal. If Mrs. 
Browning " controls " a " medium " and speaks anything above 
the inediiwiistic ability, then she can and ought to speak some- 
thing worthy of Mrs. Browning. So, at least, it seems to me. 
This entire theory of " spirit control " may be placed on a par 
with the orthodox theory of " divine control " in biblical inspir- 
ation. If God can, or ever did, speak to man or through man 
in this way, we should expect a perfect revelation of religion 
and morals and truth and duty and past and future. If man, 
with his own spirit, rises up to apprehend God, to meet him, be 
impressed by him, to the full measure of his human ability, 
then we must only expect a Bible of human depths and 
heights. If departed spirits stand forth to the half-conscious 
or sub-conscious mood of an embodied spirit, I can understand 
that in that (as one might call it) "mediumistic mood," recept- 
ive mood, a silent influence could be exerted ; as the presence 
of a mountain or a grand picture would exert its influence ; as 
the presence of any other human mind might exert its influ- 
ence ; the "medium" simply responding with the best and 
highest there is in him to the spiritual presence. Substituting 
this actio7i-of-prese?ice theory for the control theory, I can use 
the word " inspiration " for prophets and mediums alike. This 
substitution of the action-of-presence theory also removes the 
objection, the fatal negation, which I cannot otherwise remove, 
in the puerile character of so-called " communications." Stand- 
ing beside Niagara a school boy can only put his roused emo- 
tions into school-boy language. The sub-consciousness awak- 
ened, the mediumistic mood nobly challenged by the presence 
of Mrs. Browning or Shakespeare in spirit form, the embodied 
soul indistinctly but powerfully realizing the approach of the 
disembodied soul, I can understand that the " medium " would 
be inspired up into his best, into an intellectual grasp and lit- 
erary form that are far better than his usual ; but still that he 
must use his own powers of expression. Thus, when I find 
mistakes in grammar, blunders in syntax, slaughterings in 
prosody, platitudes in rhetoric, vagaries in philosophy, I am 
not compelled to charge the "communication" with fraud. 
The action-of-presence theory, and the impossibility of the con- 



7 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

trol theory, leave my mind still free to believe in the actual 
appearance of the other-world dweller amid these earthly 
scenes again. I am aware that this is a rather bold attempt to 
save Spiritualism from itself, but in my present attitude that 
seems a necessity. If the dead can literally speak to us they 
ought to do it. They ought to tell us many things that they 
certainly have learned. They ought to give warning and coun- 
sel in a thousand situations. They ought to reveal great facts, 
laws, truths, principles, such as, and higher than, our scientists, 
inventors, poets, philosophers and moralists on earth are dis- 
covering. The fact that they do not is very close to a demon- 
stration that they cannot. I can understand that the loss of 
the body requires an altogether different method of commu- 
nication from this method which we know as human speech. 
I can understand that they might take form and come near us 
and look tender love into our eyes without any longer being 
able to use our language. I can understand that their envir- 
onment is so unlike ours, their bodies and their world made up 
of such a different kind of material, that the manner- of their 
life cannot be explained in our symbols and representations of 
thought. I can understand that, while they lose our language, 
they gain a higher language, incommunicable to us — possibly a 
language of music or color or exquisite sensation — so that all 
they can do is to come near us, and by action or sound or light 
and shade make their presence known. Only by this method 
of saving Spiritualism from certain phases of its own ism can I 
see any of the blessed probability of it. I shall be perfectly 
willing, however, and immeasurably happy, to cast aside all this 
theorizing in that very day when Shakespeare shall publish a 
nobler drama than Hamlet, or Faraday shall give us an inven- 
tion that outdoes the telephone. 

If Spiritualism be established, then this human life of ours 
immediately takes on an infinitely greater value. To know, and 
not merely to hope, there is life beyond death, and reunion with 
our beloved, and studentship at the feet of the seers of all 
ages, and progress in that pursuit of knowledge and happiness 
and helpfulness which is our divine dream here — that would 
enfold the hardest lot with pleasure and canopy the lowliest 
path with glory. Then we could suffer and wait. Then we 



SPIRITUALISM. 71 

could toil and die with a sweet confidence. Then we could bid 
our loved ones the brief adieu and not break our hearts with 
agony. The evidence is not yet sufficient to satisfy my mind — 
perhaps naturally skeptical. Perhaps, also, I have not come 
into sufficiently close contact with the evidence, and am not 
acquainted with the most convincing phases of it. Hypnotism 
and telepathy, and thought-transference, and mind-projecture, 
and the possible materialization of our own occult soul-force 
rise up to challenge the " phantoms " in a scientific explanation 
of all the facts reported by the Society for Psychical Research. 
If I have uttered many suggestions and ventured few opinions 
it is simply because my mind is crowded with suggestion and 
somewhat barren of opinion on this subject. 

One word, however, of real, though lesser, satisfaction. If 
the phenomena we have been considering were, and if all such 
phenomena are, produced by a force from within our own souls, 
then do they prove that our souls, here and now, are endowed 
with powers which are super-physical — powers which relate 
vitally to a realm of activities and laws which material sci- 
ence is not able to penetrate. A soul thus endowed, thus hint- 
ing its divine independence of ordinary methods, thus lifting 
itself into touch with a really spiritual universe, is not likely to 
be exterminated by the death of the body. 



72 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 



ETHICAL CULTURE, OR, THE RELIGION 
OF AGNOSTICISM. 

There is no purpose in this paper to characterize the Society 
for Ethical Culture. The above title is not meant as applying 
to any sect or association. These three terms — ethical culture, 
agnosticism, and religion — may seem to all parties, as parties, un- 
congenial. There may even be, in the minds of the extreme dis- 
ciples of each word, a repudiation of one or both of the other 
words. I feel justified, however, in the above combination, for I 
am dealing with phases of thought, and not with organized dis- 
cipleship. There are multitudes of religious people who are 
theologically agnostic — who believe in God and immortality, but 
make no claim of knowledge ; who base their religion in ethical 
culture — who feel that righteousness is the sacred and su- 
premely important thing. These multitudes are found within 
and without all churches. Among them are many of the most 
scholarly and devoted preachers, some of the most charming 
and worshipful hymn-writers and poets, numbers of the purest 
and most Christ-like men and women. By un-knowing they 
do not mean denial. By morality they do not repudiate 
faith. They take firm stand in the known, and reach out rev- 
erently with thought and feeling toward the objects of hope. 
They put the emphasis on what they are sure of. They have 
learned to labor and to wait. These people are of the convic- 
tion, or rather they confess to their own minds, that no "reve- 
lation," in the traditional sense, has been made, and that from 
the blissful bourne no traveler has returned. They are of the 
opinion that the world came by its religious ideas, just as it 
came by its political or scientific ideas; through study and ex- 
perience. They feel that God has been at no more pains to 
teach a correct theology than a correct astronomy or a correct 
sociology. Man began his career in total ignorance, and had 
everything to learn for himself on all subjects. He is at lib- 
erty to find out about the " other world " and the after-life if 
he can, just as he is at liberty to find out the constitution of 



ETHICAL CULTURE. 73 

the comets and the fixed stars. In creation he may study the 
Creator. Creeds and Bibles are not the cause, but the product 
of man's religious thinking. This life and the conditions of this 
world, our duties and the way of happiness here, we do know. 
To make the most and best of the present, for our whole 
human brotherhood, is the first principle of the religion of 
agnosticism. 

This ethical culture of which I speak gives the broadest in- 
terpretation to those words. It means the education, develop- 
ment, refinement of every human faculty, emotional as well as 
intellectual. It accepts worship in man as a fact, just as it 
accepts the fact of reason, and would give it the same cultiva- 
tion. The shield of the Prince of Orange bore this device, 
" to maintain." On the banner of those who make ethical cul- 
ture a religion, is inscribed these words, " to complete." 
Christ's words " I come to fulfil," are their inspiration. To fill 
out the measure of man's intellectual and emotional possibili- 
ties, to complete the structure of the soul, building up bravely 
and beautifully on every foundation which is laid in the em- 
bryonic faculties of mind and heart — that is their reverent 
aim. 

The ethical culture people have seen that the major part of 
religious history is occupied with speculations about where we 
shall be and what we shall do in some other world. They have 
turned their attention to this world. They have concluded 
that to-morrow may bide its time, while we perform the duties 
of to-day. They will postpone the joys of Heaven to the jour- 
ney's end, and put a little more joy into these passing scenes. 
They will not anticipate the sufferings of Hell while so much 
earthly suffering appeals to their benevolence. They think 
that physiology is quite as important for boys and girls as the 
catechism ; that good manners are as valuable as sound doc- 
trine ; that integrity and justice are more needful than creeds ; 
that homes are as sacred as cathedrals. They declare it a 
godlier thing to keep your honest word than to keep Lent. 
They are afraid of no offence to the saints in the calendar if 
people are right-down busy at making themselves and their 
neighbors a little more saintly. Their exhortation is not to 

10 



7 4 PHA SES OF R ELIGION IN A M ERICA . 

worry about the evil inheritance you received from Adam, if 
you are bringing mind and heart to bear upon the moral heri- 
tage you are preparing for your children. They imagine that 
the " resurrection body " will take care of itself, and insist that 
we keep a sharp look-out for the health and purity and useful- 
ness of these mortal bodies. Whether we shall know each 
other in Heaven is a problem that can, without charge of pro- 
crastination, be delayed ; but these ethical culture people do 
plead for such conduct as that we shall not be ashamed to 
know each other here. 

For twelve centuries — from the fourth to the sixteenth — the 
Christian world had theology, and it had little else. If ever 
any force or system or idea or principle in this world had a full 
chance and a complete opportunity, Christian dogmatism had 
it in those twelve centuries. Its field was the world, its sub- 
jects were humanity, and its power was limitless. What were 
its fruits — Progress? Intelligence? Morality? Brotherhood? 
Peace? Happiness? Suppose that the science of the nine- 
teenth century had been born in the fourth — that Spencer 
and Darwin and Tyndall and Morse and Stevenson and Fulton 
and Edison had come along, instead of Athanasius and Arius 
and Augustine and Clement and Basil and Gregory — and that 
for twelve hundred years this scientific day, in whose dawn we 
rejoice, had pushed on to its clear and wondrous noontide : 
suppose that science had been given the same opportunity 
during those twelve hundred years that theology had, do you 
think that the world would have fetched up (or fetched down) 
where it did, at the beginning of the sixteenth century ? Sup- 
pose that our common-school system, our popular secular 
education, our popular un-theological literature, had been 
the dominant social force for twelve hundred years ; suppose 
that Shakespeare and Goethe and Hugo and Tennyson and 
Schiller and Emerson and a hundred more of their kith and kin, 
instead of the popes and cardinals and bishops of the church, had 
been the world's leaders for that great period — can you imagine 
that mankind would have dragged on in ignorance and poverty 
and war and civil hatreds and mutual persecutions and universal 
wretchedness as it did ? Ccln any sane man look forward 
twelve hundred years, counting upon the work of these un- 



ETHICAL CULTURE. 7S 

theological forces now in the field, and dream that the year 
three thousand will witness the debasement which twelve cen- 
turies of theology left the nations of Europe as an heritage ? 
The Christian world, during that long reign of theology, if we 
compare it with a single decade of science or literature, made 
no progress, gained no intelligence, built up no morality, 
formed no brotherhood, enjoyed no peace, produced no happi- 
ness. The centers of theology were the radiators of darkness. 
Where it was most powerful men were most cruel and most 
immoral. As the savior of human society in this world it was 
an infinite failure. The ethical culture people have concluded 
that it is high time to try something else. 

Even if we neglect theology a while, let us have justice and 
righteousness. Let us have a kind of taxation which takes 
money from those who have money to spare, not bread from 
starving children's mouths; let us have laws which favor the 
helpless, not laws which favor the fortunate ; let us have, wide- 
spread, that kind of knowledge by which mothers can rear 
their daughters in health and sane thinking, and their sons in 
honor and purity. Let us have a mighty baptism of that senti- 
ment in the glow of which husbands and wives become friends 
and equal companions. Let us have an unroofed temple of the 
mind wherein honest thought can receive the benedictions of 
heaven. Let us have the sense of brotherhood in which char- 
ity is needless, because justice and mutual respect are en- 
throned. Let us have governments with brain enough in them, 
and humanity enough, to keep children out of the factories and 
keep them in school. Let there be a popular demand, strong 
and immediate as the demands of death, that newspapers and 
drinking water alike be clear of sewage. Let us have a system 
of moral training by which the youth of our land will come to 
despise selfishness and vanity and boorishness and gossip and 
snobbery, as they dread a mistake in the waltz or deplore a 
wrong color on their bonnets. Let there be a feeling of human 
kindness by which the leaders of society will take as deep an 
interest in the sufferings of people as in the prevention of cru- 
elty to animals. Let there be established an ethical standard 
by which campaign lies and political slanders and business mis- 
representations and frauds are stamped down to the level of 



76 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

common theft and falsehood ; an ethical standard by which 
drunkenness and sensuality are made as disreputable in men as 
in women. When we have these things nobly secured, it will 
be time, if ever, for the hundreds of thousands of Christian 
ministers to give fifty Sundays of the fifty-two in every year to 
a consideration of life in some other world ; but our ethical 
culture friends do insist that, at present, it were eminently wise 
to look after the conditions of life in this world. 

We have seen what theology will do : how it will organize a 
vast political machinery and usurp a " divine right " over the 
public and private conduct, over the thoughts and consciences 
of men ; how it will pervert the worship of God into the most 
rigid and merciless tyranny ; how it will set up the books and 
traditions of past as lords over all investigation and reason and 
moral sense ; how it will crush knowledge and freedom and 
affection with an arbitrary authority ; how it will foster bigotry 
and exclusiveness and hatred and hyprocrisy ; how it will exalt 
such wretches as Gideon and Samson and Barak and Jael and 
Jehu and Solomon and Esther, above such noble and redeem- 
ing souls as Darwin and Lincoln and George Eliot and Emer- 
son and Theodore Parker and Bradlaugh ; how it will place 
character on a footstool and credulity on a throne ; how it will 
turn even a liberal church in a petty, bickering, textual, jeal- 
ous, pur-blind company of heresy-hunters ; how it will descend 
to the lowest methods of ward politics to defeat reason and 
prevent intellectual progress ; how it appeals to prejudice, and 
encourages misrepresentation, and panders to gossip and med- 
dlesomeness for denominational ends — we have seen what the- 
ology will do. Now let us see what morality will do. Let us see 
what it will amount to in this world if men are rated on their 
merits ; if truth is put above creed ; if honesty is exalted beyond 
sectarianism ; if goodness is given precedence over faith ; if 
righteousness is made more honorable than loyalty; if loving 
your neighbor for his sake is deemed a godlier thing than hat- 
ing him for the church's sake ; if knowledge is considered of 
more worth than tradition ; if the golden rule eclipse the 
catechism ; if purity and integrity and kindness are looked 
upon with more favor than " sound doctrine." 

Theology has dealt with things that people did not and could 



ETHICAL CULTURE. 77 

not know, and for these unknown and unknowable objects of 
credulity the hatreds and slanders and tyrannies and murders 
of all the Christian centuries have been fostered and furthered. 
It is time to base our religion in things known. We cannot 
prove the Trinity, but we can prove that honesty in trade and 
politics is good for people. We cannot demonstrate that be- 
lief in the Atonement saves men from Hell, but we can demon- 
strate that sobriety and chastity saves them from ruin and 
disgrace. We cannot show with any certainty that God has 
elected some men to eternal joy and some to eternal misery, 
but we can show with absolute certainty that by good or bad 
conduct men elect themselves to joy or misery in this life. We 
have no means of determining that Christ's mother was a vir- 
gin, but we have ample means of determining that healthy and 
pure and wise motherhood is God's way of producing divine 
sonships the world over. It is impossible to convince un- 
enslaved intellects that the one hundred and ninth psalm was 
an inspiration from heaven, but we have no trouble at all in 
convincing men that a clean and happy home is heavenly. 
Let us base our religion in what is known. Let us plead the 
things we are sure of. Let us learn to be infinitely ashamed of 
the littleness and boorishness which quarrels and fights about 
the unknown. Let us accept every theology as a speculation, 
and rate all speculations at just what they are worth in the 
production of morals. Let us take theologians, as we take 
poets and philosophers, putting their ideas to the practical test, 
and giving them credit for the good they accomplish. Let us 
have no more qualms about rejecting any religious theory or 
text that was ever written, if it fails to accomplish good, than 
we would have in rejecting the mistakes and vagaries of lit- 
erature or politics. Let us reverence as God's word whatever 
shows the persistent power to make men better. That is the 
foundation of the ethical culture movement. 

Not only do the agnostic religionists put emphasis on the 
word moral ; they also put emphasis on the word culture — 
moral culture — culture of the emotions. It is a melancholy 
fact that the world has never undertaken any systematic cul- 
ture of feeling, as it has undertaken in schools and colleges 
the systematic cultivation of intellect. Emotion as a science 



78 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

has been sadly neglected. It is the most important thing in 
this human world ; fraught with the severest dangers, liable to 
the worst abuses, capable of bringing the loftiest happiness, 
exposed to the deadliest temptations, an easy prey to the deep- 
est miseries, avenue to our highest and finest joys, instrument 
of our noblest successes, leverage against us for our most piti- 
iable and heart-rending failures; and yet the culture of emotion 
has been almost totally neglected. Feelings have been allowed 
to run wild. This vast realm of forces in the soul, unhar- 
nessed, unharmonized and undrilled, rampant as the beasts of 
the field, or beautiful only as the unkempt flowers of the field, 
tangled and weed-choked — this inner realm still waits its gov- 
ernor, its gardner and its master musician. Like a deaf man, 
who alternately shrieks and whispers, the multitudes are given 
to emotional extravagance. They bubble with cheap senti- 
ment or beguile themselves with raging enthusiasm ; they love 
to distraction and hate furiously; they shout and weep; they 
laugh and scold ; they give way to the most silly prejudices 
and become ecstatic over the most ridiculous whims ; they are 
hot as furnaces or cold as icebergs ; they think that you are an 
angel, and then that you are a devil ; tp-day they assent to the 
death of Christ in right cowardly fashion, and to-morrow they 
fling their own lives to the mob ; they are patriots or rebels by 
the easy hypnotism of a conscienceless orator. There is no 
wonder if revivalists and stump speakers and deceitful lovers 
and needless wars and sensational novels do still flourish. All 
these will find their occupation gone when people get control 
of their own emotions. 

The work of the church, be it said with regret, has averaged 
on the wrong side in this phase of human education. The 
church has systematically aroused prejudice, hardened the 
sense of justice, inflamed thoughtless hatreds, and drawn rivers 
of fictitious tears. On the side of their natural tenderness the 
church has played upon the griefs and sorrows of men, irri- 
tating their wounds into incurable sores, and heating their pen- 
itence into a constant fever of anxiety. On the side of their 
natural indifference it has hardened and calloused all sensi- 
bility. The church has given us an emotional education by 
which we can cry like children for the bodily sufferings of a 



ETHICAL CULTURE. 79 

good man eighteen centuries dead, though we can sit without 
flinching and listen to a sermon an hour long on the present 
and eternal torture, in Hell, of our good neighbor who died 
yesterday. I heard a speaker describe how, in the heat of bat- 
tle, a cavalry officer dismounted and lifted up a wounded bird, 
and gently put it back in the nest ; and the dear audience lifted 
up its voice and wept. In the next three sentences the speaker 
told how his division swept down upon the enemy, driving 
them from their guns, leaving five thousand of our Southern 
brothers dead on the field ; and the same dear audience lifted 
up its voice and shouted for joy. Why should an audience 
that delights in the eternal damnation of heretics feel sorry 
for the mothers and wives and children of slaughtered soldiers 
who were duped into the enemy's ranks ! By all the power of 
fifteen centuries of theological drilling, let them shout ! By 
virtue of this long drill it has come to pass that our emotions 
are even more barbarous than our thoughts, and more silly. I 
cannot imagine anything else that the world so profoundly 
needs as about a hundred thousand societies for ethical culture. 
To cultivate emotion does not mean to destroy it, but to 
make it healthy and normal and strong and skillful and fine. 
The gymnasium does not destroy muscle. A conservatory of 
music does not destroy voices. Education does not destroy 
memory and reason. Cultivated feeling does not mean less 
feeling, but that feeling shall gain poise, become independent, 
manifest itself only on worthy occasions ; read small things 
small and large things large; have depth and abiding power 
for any cause that measures up divinely ; have quiet resistance 
for trifles, reserve energy for emergencies, and the most deli- 
cate tuning for all fine and beautiful sentiments. When we 
have gained a fadeless compassion for all who suffer ; a sus- 
tained enthusiasm for the man who does right and speaks the 
truth ; when we have a robust enjoyment of the beauties of 
nature ; a moving sense of grandeur in the presence of moun- 
tain or billow ; a thrilling pleasure as we stand before some 
noble work of art ; a serene joy in the rhythm of poetry ; when 
we can get a sacred happiness in looking upon children in their 
play, and feel a holy reverence for woman's love and the pure 
brow of an aged man ; when the griefs of strangers warm our 



80 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

instincts of brotherhood more than our feelings of pity ; when 
the mysteries of life and death awake that loving seriousness 
which is the very essence of prayer ; when we have learned to 
feel, as we have learned to think, profoundly, independently, 
equably, persistently, rationally, beautifully and musically — 
then will the revivalist and the campaign orator and the sensa- 
tional author, and the emotional " confidence man " of all 
types, find his occupation gone. 

I have said that the religion of ethical culture is agnostic. 
It does not pretend to know the future — its hopes. If there be 
any future life, it must be simply the continuation of this life. 
The conditions of happiness must be, in all moral ways, the 
same. I do not know that I shall remain in this world another 
year, but I know that, if I remain fifty years, I shall ever need 
the moral qualities that I need to-day. It were a great com- 
fort to know about the realm beyond death, but, as for getting 
ready to enjoy it, we can do that without knowing. A prepa- 
ration for this world is a preparation for any world. 

What is the relation between morality and worship ? About 
the same as that between intelligence and morality — in the 
blossoms of each the fruit of the other is nurtured. Worship 
is not a building that may be constructed, but a fruit that may 
be grown ; and the way to produce the fruit is to cultivate the 
tree. Spirituality is the higher manifestation of ethics. Out 
of a pure desire for the world's righteousness will arise the 
conviction of Eternal Righteousness, just as the idea of eternal 
wrath arose from the ceaseless hatreds of men and nations. A 
cloud of incense will form above the temple as a poisonous fog 
will gather above the marsh. Religion is interior development, 
not external authority. Out of kindness comes reverence. 
Every lover, in the supreme hour of his self-surrender, is a 
natural worshiper. When we sacredly feel that men are our 
brothers, it were difficult to keep back the belief and the 
happy trust in a Heavenly Father. Believe profoundly in the 
good and holy things of earth, and the visions of immortality 
will come. Do not feel under any necessity to say that God is 
a person, and must be worshiped ; let mind and heart have 
liberty ; revere the majesties of truth and duty and love and 
sorrow that are in the world ; let your enthusiasm and your 



ETHICAL CULTURE. 81 

pathos awake to the nobilities and sacrifices that you see and 
know. The kingdom of heaven is not taken by violence — it is 
the ripened harvest of the summer sun. Faithfulness produces 
faith. He that doeth the will of God shall know the doctrine. 
" Finally, my brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever 
things are honest, whatsoever are just, whatsoever things are 
pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of 
good repute ; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, 
think on these things." By thinking on these, and living in 
them, you shall come to believe whatsoever is needful. Seek 
ye first the purities of earth, and the comforts of Heaven shall 
be added unto you. 



ii 



82 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 



REFORM WITHIN THE CHURCHES; 
OR, THE RELIGION OF INTERPRETATION. 

The story is common of an American traveler in Italy, who 
asked a priest if he really believed the infallibility of the Pope ; 
and the priest replied, " I do not ; few priests of intelligence 
do ; but the people believe it, and they would be greatly 
shocked if we expressed any doubt upon the matter; and so, 
for the sake of peace and quiet in the church, we allow them 
to suppose that our thought is not different from the thought 
of the fathers." The story proceeds, to the effect that, soon 
afterward, the American asked a Catholic layman if he believed 
the infallibility of the Pope ; and the layman replied, " I do 
not; few of our people of the intelligent class believe it; but 
the priests believe it, and they would be greatly worried to 
know that we were falling away from their teachings ; and so, 
for the good of the church, we keep our doubts quietly to 
ourselves." 

As an irresponsible story that may not have much foundation 
in fact; but it is sufficiently characteristic to illustrate the gen- 
eral facts of the case, whether in Rome or London or New 
York, whether in the Catholic or in the Evangelical churches. 
That the religious world is losing faith in God and immortality, 
I do not believe ; but that it is fast abandoning, silently re- 
stating, the traditional theology, I am well convinced. That 
new meanings are everywhere put into the old words, and that 
ministry and laity alike are afraid to confess their full minds to 
each other, can no longer be hidden from ordinary observation. 
Clergymen and people are equally deceived as to the ultimate 
convictions of the other party; but the deception is rapidly 
dissolving. If it were possible to get at the perfectly honest 
convictions of those who think enough to form convictions of 
their own, I do not believe that one minister in ten, or one lay- 
man in ten, would vow his allegiance to the ruin of human 
nature in Adam, or the possibility of salvation only by atone- 



IN TERPRE TA TION. 8 3 

ment and faith. I do not believe that one in ten thinks of the 
Bible as a verbatim revelation ; or of the Trinity as other than 
a poetic statement ; or has any idea that these physical bodies, 
or one single atom of them, will ever be resurrected. I do not 
believe there is one in ten who denies that morality is, and 
will forever be, salvation ; who holds that none but the " elect " 
or the " converted " will be able to avoid that eternal torture 
which has been prepared for them that love their fellow men ; 
or who feels at all afraid that Charles Dickens or Charles Dar- 
win or Charles Bradlaugh went to Hell. I do not believe that 
one in ten accepts the story of Jonah as historic ; or confesses 
to himself, however emphatically the Bible declares it, that 
God was pleased with the wholesale assassination conducted by 
Jehu. For what is vainly supposed to be the good of the 
church, the people and the preachers alike keep silent just 
as long as they can stifle their truer thoughts. With a thor- 
oughly honest and honorable purpose not to shock anybody, 
they would cautiously insinuate the new conviction into the 
old phrase, as the physician wraps a pill in jelly, and give the 
truth unrecognized. 

The churches keep on repeating the ancient creeds, but 
nine-tenths of all thinking people put a private interpretation 
on every article — an_ interpretation which is as different from 
the historic meaning of the words as poetry from mathematics. 
The creed declares that all men were lost in Adam. It means 
that Adam surrendered us to the Devil, just as a conquered 
general surrenders his army to the victor. People do not be- 
lieve that. They believe in the hereditary transmission of evil 
by natural law. If there was any Adam, and if he were the 
progenitor of the whole human race, and if he had vices (which 
he probably had); then, in this perfectly natural way, it might 
be said, thoughtlessly, that we all have the taint of his weak- 
nesses. Thoughtlessly said, even then, for the transference of 
any moral quality through so many generations will seem very 
poetic, once you look at the mathematics of the problem. 
Each of you had two parents ; they had 4 ; they had 8 ; they had 
16; five hundred years ago you had, theoretically, 91,000 an- 
cestors; seven hundred years ago you had over 5,000,000; a 
thousand years ago you had nearly 3,000,000,000 ; two thousand 



84 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

years ago you had about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 ; three thous- 
and years ago you had something like 1,000,000,000,000,000,- 
000,000,000,000,000. That is theoretical, of course ; but, with- 
out intermarriage, if you took that array of figures for a de- 
nominator, with 1 for a numerator, the fraction would repre- 
sent the amount of heredity you have received from any one 
ancestor of three thousand years ago. Though you are in the 
direct line from King Solomon, you must look to some other 
source for your wisdom, In the light of that fraction you need 
not feel that he is at all responsible for your vices. Conversely, 
that same fraction would represent what Solomon might have 
received of any of the widely diffused vices of Adam. This 
fraction also represents, in a general way, the common beliefs 
of people in the traditional tenets of theology. The average 
man of reading and intelligence accepts about that much of 
the dogmatism of the 4th or the 16th century. 

The creed says that Christ died for our redemption. It 
means, in its Roman form, that the Devil accepted Christ's 
death as a substitute for the eternal torture of the race. We 
were all doomed. Adam had surrendered us. We were in 
the Devil's hands, and he might do what he pleased with us. 
He pleased to torture us all forever. Christ offered himself 
as our substitute — himself suffered and died. Thus the Devil 
humiliated the Son of God. In this his Satanic vanity was 
satiated, and he allowed the human race to go free. It was a 
military transaction. The Devil had created a disturbance in 
Heaven. He had been thrown out. He waited an opportunity 
to get vengeance. By playing on the weaknesses of Adam 
he got the human race into his power. He would revenge 
himself on God by torturing God's human children. Christ 
offered himself as hostage and suffered physical death. The 
Devil had his revenge. Humanity was redeemed. People 
used to believe that. They do not believe one-nonnillionth 
of it now. They do not believe any more in the other great 
historic form of atonement, by which Christ's death was sup- 
posed to satisfy God's justice, or the demands of the Divine 
government. People believe simply that Christ was a martyr ; 
that his teachings and his example and his character and his 
heroic sufferings have exercised a great influence for good upon 



INTER PRE TA TION. 8 5 

humanity. In the perfectly natural way in which children are 
saved to a good life by the love and the purity of their mothers, 
in which boys are saved to a good life by the careful training 
and noble conduct of their teachers, in which a nation is lifted 
higher in the moral scale by the writings of Emerson and 
Whittier, and by the characters of Washington and Lincoln — 
so, the Christian world, in its thought and feeling, in its moral 
standards and its ideals, is lifted up and purified by Christ. 
That is what they believe, though they keep on repeating, as if 
it had a deep and vital meaning, that perfectly meaningless 
word "Atonement." 

The creed stands forth boldly and declares the Divinity of 
Christ. It means, without any equivocation, that Christ was 
God. People used to believe it. They don't believe it now. 
They keep on using the words " Divinity of Christ," allowing 
whomsoever will to be deceived ; but if you put them to a private 
questioning you will find that by the word divinity they mean 
Christ's greatly exalted moral and spiritual leadership— his 
ideal human character. At very most, they mean that he was 
a man especially endowed and inspired for his great religious 
work. Men say, "Oh, well; I can accept the word divinity in 
that sense, and keep in with my Orthodox neighbors — why 
not?" There is no reason why not, if the great object in life 
is to keep in with people. Of course, there is always 
danger that the farce will be exposed and ridiculed ; but these 
sticklers for the careful and candid use of words constitute a 
small minority. 

The creed declares that the Bible was given by inspiration. 
It means that the men who wrote the Bible were reporters or 
mediums ; that God was the author of the book, just as Milton 
was the author of Paradise Lost, though his daughters acted 
as amenuenses; or, as the medium in a seance writes and 
speaks what the controlling spirit impresses upon her vision ; 
or, as a hypnotized person obeys the will of the operator. 
That is what all the old creeds mean when they say that the 
Bible was given by inspiration ; but that is not what the vast 
majority of thinking people in our churches believe. They 
believe that the better portions of the Bible were written by 
men who had special religious genius and training; just as our 
books on evolution were written by men who had special 



86 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

scientific genius and training; just as Hamlet and Lear were 
written by a man who had special dramatic genius and train- 
ing. Thousands of men keep on saying " Given by inspira- 
tion," when they mean "Produced by a cultured spirituality." 
It is exactly as if one should say " The sun travels round the 
earth," when he means that the earth turns upon its axis. If 
all the "best families" were organized into a society whose 
creed was that the sun traveled round the earth, there would 
be a plenty of people, who didn't believe it, that would keep on 
saying it. 

The creed says, " I believe in the resurrection of the body." 
The authors of the creed didn't know any better than to mean 
exactly what they wrote. They lived before science made such 
a belief ridiculous. They honestly supposed that these bodies 
would come to life again and rise from the grave. The 
churches keep on repeating that assertion in their most sacred 
services ; they keep it in their revised creeds. The preachers 
are afraid of offending the people ; the people are afraid of 
hurting the preachers. They are all afraid of some how or 
other hurting the church, if they make the candid confession 
before the world, and strike out this ridiculous old article, 
which they do not believe, any more than they believe in per- 
petual motion or phlogiston or the philosopher's stone or the 
transmutation of all substances into gold. 

As to the resurrection of Christ, there are multitudes who 
embrace all opportunities to say, " O yes ! we believe in the 
resurrection of Christ." They carelessly, (or carefully ?) leave 
the impression that they mean the raising of his body from the 
tomb ; but you question them closely and you'll find that is 
not what they mean. They mean merely that Christ lived on 
and was seen after his death— not in his physical body, but 
in what St. Paul calls the "spiritual body." Resurrectio7i, in 
the creed, means the coming to life again of that which was 
dead. People now-a-days do not believe that the thing which 
, died came to life— they believe in life beyond for that which 
did not die, i. <?., they do not believe in resurrection at all ; but 
they keep on using the word, lest somebody who no more be- 
lieves in it than they do, shall accuse them of heresy. 

The creed proclaims the establishment of the Christian 



INTERPRETA TION. 87 

church by the power of God-wrought miracles; and everybody 
knows that by miracle the creed-makers meant a supernatural, 
an unnatural, event — a direct act of God such as nature was in- 
capable of effecting. But the theologian in this closing 
decade of the 19th century is rare indeed who puts any such 
meaning into the word. By miracle he means the action of 
higher, unusual, occult, but perfectly natural laws and forces. 
He is entirely conscious that his meaning is not the historic 
meaning, but he does not like to shock the dear people. 

To say that you believe in miracles, but that you define a 
miracle as a very unusual freak of nature, is like saying that 
you believe in hereditary monarchy but that you would have a 
new king elected every four years by popular vote. 

If people really believe that the sick can be instantly cured 
by the action of some higher law, even that the dead can be 
raised by the action of higher law, let them say so — but that is 
not a miracle in the historic sense. The creed is that these 
things were done, not by any force in nature, but by the super- 
natural act of God. Make them natural and thev cannot be 
miraculous, for miraculous means that which is not natural. 
You may as well talk of hot ice or sweet vinegar as of natural 
miracles. 

This is the pass to which we have come in our theology — 
popular belief to-day on all the great problems of theology is 
utterly unlike the popular belief of the 16th century; and yet 
the churches are using the same old words and phrases. Do 
you wonder that people get mixed in their understanding of 
the preacher's remarks ? What would you think of a well- 
known Evolutionist who should say, " We do not deny the 
Biblical account of creation." It was only a little while ago 
that a Universalist minister said, "We do not deny the Divin- 
ity of Christ." I can understand what he meant. He used 
the word divinity in the sense of idealism. But he must have 
been perfectly aware that every Orthodox listener would mis- 
understand him. A Unitarian minister made use of the Trini- 
tarian phrase, " Father, Son and Holy Ghost." On being 
asked if he meant to have people understand that he believed 
in the deity of Jesus and in the personality of the Holy Ghost, 
he said, " Why, no ; I put my own meaning into the formula." 



8 8 PHA SES OF R ELIGION IN A ME RICA . 

Then he went on to explain that it was a Bible phrase and he 
did not think the Bible writer meant it in the trinitarian sense. 
It really begins to look as if we must become acquainted with 
the preacher by means of private questioning before we can 
even guess at his belief from the words he makes use of in his 
public utterances. 

There is growing up a theory that the pulpit ought to adopt 
something of scientific precision in its use of language, but that 
theory is more honored in the breach than in the observance. 
The present ambiguity is very unfortunate, but it may be that 
our only relief will come in the line of the fault. The evil will 
so multiply as to work its own cure. When everybody uses 
the old word with the new meaning nobody will be deceived. 
Now that it has become the prevalent mode for ladies to have 
the servant say, " Not at home," though they mean, " It is in- 
convenient to receive calls," the phrase ceases to be a falsehood. 
It has acquired a new meaning — that is all. 

Coming out from New York on the Pennsylvania train, the 
conductor shouted, "Stop at Harrison on flag;" but when 
we arrived at Harrison there was no flag — it was a board. I 
suppose that in the early days of railroading they used a flag. 
In Europe they call a locomotive engineer " the driver," and a 
conductor "the guard." These names come down from the 
time when there was a driver, and a guard, on the stage coach. 

In some such way it may transpire that our new beliefs will 
find lodgment in the old theological words. Miracle will, by 
and by, mean simply the unusual. Revelation will mean 
spiritual insight and religious discovery. Divinity will mean 
moral excellence. Atonement will mean good influence. 
Resurrection will mean the continued life of the spirit. The 
" fall in Adam " will mean the laws of heredity. The " day of 
judgment" will mean the natural and necessary results of con- 
duct, any and all days. Conversion will mean reformation. 
"The Son," in the trinitarian formula, will mean that Jesus 
was the most godly of men. " Holy Ghost," or Holy Spirit, 
will mean a spirit of holiness, a pure purpose, a good dis- 
position. " Holy Scripture " will mean the excellence of the re- 
ligious literature of the Jews and the early Christians. Proph- 
ecy will mean the longing and the hope for a better time which 



IN TERPRE TA TION. 8 « 

the old Hebrew reformers dreamed out ; for prophet will mean 
reformer. "The Kingdom of God " will mean good character, 
and Hell will mean bad character. Reward will mean the 
natural fruit of right living, and punishment will mean the 
essential result of wrong living. Prayer will mean a thoughtful 
reverence and an uplift of the heart in loving adoration. Provi- 
dence will mean evolution. Heaven will mean the intellectual 
and moral progress of the future. The Trinity will mean that 
God manifests himself to men in various ways. Inspiration 
will mean the soul's deep breath in a region of great thought 
and noble feeling. The Lord's Supper will mean a sacred com- 
munion with the ideals of humanity. Baptism will mean the 
confession of love for a true life. " The Holy Catholic Church" 
will mean our common sympathies in the great purpose to 
worship God and in the great hope of immortality. "Apostolic 
succession'' will mean the continuity of religious thought or 
feeling. Ordination will mean official recognition. Christi- 
anity will mean ethical and emotional culture. " Salvation by 
faith " will mean the influence which a man's belief has upon 
his conduct. Redemption will mean helpfulness. Savior will 
mean " one who assists," Religion will mean the unfoldment 
of our better selves. These are some of the interpretations 
of which our modern churches are full to the brim. 

If you will keep all these interpretations in mind, and 
promptly supply the interpretation whenever you hear a popu- 
lar preacher use one of the old words or phrases, you will very 
likely find yourself in the neighborhood of his real belief. This 
is the silent reform that is going on within the churches. 

A very striking confirmation of what I have said about this 
habit of dropping the old meaning out of the old words is 
found in a recent book by a prominent clergyman of the Epis- 
copal church. The book to which I refer is entitled " The 
Heart of The Creeds ;" and, among other statements that are 
remarkable, the author makes this very remarkable statement : 
" When we say that Jesus was born of a virgin, that upon his 
death he descended into hell, that he rose from the grave the 
third day, we mean the truth of history, whatever that may 
be." Isn't that broad enough for the broadest churchman, or 
jester, that ever lived ? We say that Jesus was born of a virgin, 
12 



90 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

that his body was raised from the tomb ; we do not even pre- 
tend to believe these statements ; they are forms in our ritual ; 
we repeat them just as we would sing fa, sol, la ; they are 
sounds, not ideas ; we believe whatever shall be established by 
criticism as the probable facts in the case. 

That was the stand taken by Mr. McQueary. The creed 
plainly declares for the virgin birth and the physical resur- 
rection. He felt at liberty to deny both, because the creed has 
dwindled into a mere/tf, sol, la. It is an intonation. 

Dr. Heber Newton seems to take the same stand. In the 
three famous sermons on " Church and Creed," that he has 
recently delivered, he makes the Bible to be the outgrowth of 
Hebrew experience ; allows a poetic interpretation of the Trin- 
ity which any Unitarian might freely adopt ; declares that the 
Apostles' Creed is the drift of ages, and that Orthodox theology 
itself is the accumulation and petrification of the theories of 
several centuries ; sets forth that Jesus did not found the 
church nor institute the sacraments ; obliterates the historic 
conceptions of Atonement and Salvation by Faith ; declares 
that Episcopalian belief is not, and shall not be bound to a 
creed ; says that the Thirty-nine Articles are but a commentary 
on the Nicene Creed, which was itself but a philosophic con- 
ception, and that all men of this age may exercise the divine 
right of mental reservation. 

Another Episcopalian book, " The Kernel and The Husk," 
recognizes the burden of the New Testament miracles on 
modern thought, and tells the Divinity students of Oxford that 
they may with perfect liberty unload the burden. 

In Mr. Gladstone's book, " The Impregnable Rock of Holy 
Scripture," he frankly confesses that there are mistakes in the 
Bible ; that the doctrine of its inerrancy cannot be maintained ; 
that the dates of some of its books must be placed centuries 
later than the received chronology ; that science is often con- 
tradicted, and the moral teaching is sometimes bad —claiming 
only that the great overlapping trend and purpose of the Book 
are divine — that God superintended, rather than wrote, the 
Bible ; details being left to the human authors. It were a 
natural step, and one that everybody will soon take, from that 
standpoint to the idea that God merely superintended Jewish 



INTERPRETATION. 91 

history ; allowing the human authors to make their own books 
entire. The next, and essential, step will be that God super- 
intends human history, and the Jewish only as a part and 
parcel of humanity's career. With these two, the third step 
must be taken — that God superintends human history by means 
of the forces and laws which He sustains in nature and human 
nature. 

Speaking of the contradictions of science in the Bible, even 
Joseph Cook has said, and Mr. Talmage is credited with rep- 
etition of the saying, that " The Bible was given to teach us 
how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go." Evolution 
has won the day. There are no more champions of the geo- 
logy of Genesis. Historic criticism is also winning the day. A 
rapidly lessening number of scholars even pretend to believe 
that Moses wrote Genesis, or any other portion of the Penta- 
teuch, except possibly the Ten Commandments, which, in large 
part, he copied from Egyptian writings. 

Another book, recently issued, taken with the circumstances 
of its issuance, is worth comment as marking an era in the 
Evangelical thought of the day. This is an American book, 
and its title is "Belief in God" Its author is Dr. Schurman, 
professor of philosophy at Cornell. The book is composed of 
six lectures, which were delivered last year before the theolo- 
gical students of Andover. O, Andover, stronghold of Puri- 
tanism, how art thou become the mother of heresy ! In these 
lectures to the coming preachers of the Congregational Church, 
Prof. Schurman denies miracles ; calls the resurrection of 
Christ's body a symbol of the uprising life of the soul ; turns 
lightly from the virgin birth ; declares his belief in Evolution ; 
says that revelation can only mean that God has endowed man 
with the capacity of apprehending his Creator ; that man had 
to gain his own knowledge of religion as of everything else ; 
that the Trinity is a Brahminic as well as a Christian doctrine, 
and is a matter of speculation with both; that endless punish- 
ment is too horrible for any well-bred man to believe ; that 
suffering, here and hereafter, is God's natural method of com- 
pelling men to study and reform. Upon such meats do our 
young Caesars at Andover feed. What wonder that heresy is 
grown so great ! 



92 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

One of the most peculiar books of this sort is " The Struggle 
for Im?nortality," by Mrs. E. S. Phelps, who claims to speak 
for the intelligent and cultured Orthodoxy of the present time. 
Her claim is that the churches have already become liberal ; 
that they have already cast overboard their Jonah of 16th 
century dogmatism. She waxes warm, and considers it a 
shameful misrepresentation to attribute the belief of their 
fathers to the thoughtful members of the Orthodox fold of this 
day. She deems it well nigh an insult to accuse the cultured 
members of Presbyterian and Congregational and Methodist 
churches of believing their own creeds. She says that it is bar- 
barous to attack a man for the belief of his grandfather ; that 
it is more barbarous still to impute the sin of Adam to the 
children of the 19th century. She says that a growing pro- 
portion of Christians do not believe that the Bible teaches an 
endless Hell, and she strongly intimates that they would not 
believe it if the Bible did so teach. She declares that all in- 
telligent Orthodox people believe that God loves poor wretched 
sinners better than we do, and that He will treat them better 
in this and in all worlds. She scouts the seven-day creation of 
Genesis ; thinks that Moses copied many of his laws from the 
Egyptians ; that David's character would not pass muster now ; 
that Luke was mistaken in his genealogy; that the Devil is an 
old wives' fable ; that salvation by conversion, or faith, or any- 
thing else than moral character, is a worn-out delusion ; that 
the resurrection of the body is a pitiable mistake. 

Well, well, if that is the Orthodoxy of the present time what 
is the use of keeping up our Universalist and Unitarian 
churches ! I think that Mrs. Phelps, with her characteristic 
heat and emphasis, claims entirely too much rationalism for 
her Evangelical companions ; but her book will do much to- 
ward helping those companions along the way that she has 
traveled. Certain it is that traditional theology is in the toils. 
It is faring badly in the house of its friends. The very people 
who carry the banners are undermining the walls, and the day 
of doctrinal collapse draweth nigh. 

One of the greatest books of the age is "The Influence of 
Greek Ideas and Usages Upon The Christian Church," by Dr. 
Edwin Hatch, of Oxford ; in which he shows conclusively that 



INTERPRETATION. 98 

said influence was simply this — to confer upon the Christian 
church its body of theology ; the doctrine of the Trinity, the 
whole Nicene Creed, not being Christian thought at all, but 
Greek philosophy under a new name. 

Still another book to be mentioned in this connection is 
Canon Driver's "Introduction to the Literature of the Old Tes- 
tament." The learned author says that the Higher Criticism 
•' does not touch either the authority or inspiration of the 
Scriptures," and then he proceeds to show what Higher Crit- 
icism has done. It has robbed Moses of all pretentions to 
authorship. It has brought portions of the Pentateuch forward 
nine hundred years. It has stripped David of his honor as the 
Psalmist — scattering the psalms all along through Jewish his- 
tory down to the second or third century B. C. It has taken 
from Solomon the glory of the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes ; from 
Isaiah the last twenty-six chapters ; placed the book of Job in 
the Babylonian period and set down the speeches of Elihu as a 
later interpolation ; brought the book of Daniel forward to the 
age of the Maccabees ; given Esther its true character of a 
revengeful fiction ; stamped Ecclesiastes as a one-sided and 
mistaken view of life ; and in every way shows that the Old 
Testament was built up out of the passions and hopes and 
experience and thought of the Jewish people, just as naturally 
as any other literature has arisen from human experience. 
Certainly that puts a new meaning into the words authority 
and inspiration. 

Never was there such rapid dissolution of any system 
venerated by man as of the so-called Christian Theology to-day. 
Faith will not dissolve, nor worship, for the heresy of this age 
is the heresy of largeness ; it is the denial of small and narrow 
things in the interest alike of mental freedom and heart free- 
dom ; but Christianity already is as different from Evangelical 
dogmatism as it is from Brahminism. The old words may be 
retained, but not an old meaning. 



94 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 



THE CONSENSUS OF REASON AND EMOTION; 
OR, THE RELIGION OF ECLECTICISM'. 

Wendell Philips tells of the old Brahmin, who dreamed that 
he saw the human race put upon the track to speed for its life, 
and it was bitted and bridled, and the reins went back to an 
iron hand. Then a change came o'er the spirit of the dream 
and the iron hand with the reins and the bits and bridle disap- 
peared, while from the forehead of humanity silken ribbons were 
seen going out to a hand of flesh, which beckoned onward as it 
led the way. If silken ribbons, or a chain of flowers, were seen 
going on from the heart also, the dream would have its ful- 
fillment in the religion of the present age. Not reason alone, 
but reason and emotion are the authorities now. The day when 
traditional theology can drive men is being blessed with a sunset. 
Command has given way to leadership. The church can no 
longer set up its Og's bedstead of essential doctrines and chop 
men off at head and heels, or stretch them out, till they fit this 
intellectual resting place. The change from essential doctrines to 
helpful ideas, from saving faith to a comforting and inspiring 
trust, has already come over the spirit of our dreams. " Essen- 
tial doctrines" and "saving faith" had reference to the possi- 
bility of getting to Heaven. Helpful ideas and a comforting 
and inspiring trust refer to our usefulness and happiness in this 
world. People are fast concluding that what is good for this 
world may be relied on for any world. 

The question that has agitated so many Christian centuries 
has been : " What are the essential doctrines ; i. <?., what particu- 
lar things must people believe to keep out of eternal torment? " 
The idea back of that question —that belief in some doctrines 
was the only means of escape — has been the power which filled 
these Christian centuries with tyranny and persecution and 
hatred and all inquisitorial horrors. We may despise the ig- 
norance of persecutors, but before we condemn their motives we 
must look at the case from their standpoint. Suppose that a 



ECLECTICISM. 95 

man crept into your pantry at night and sifted arsenic into the 
flour of which your children's bread was made ; and suppose 
that two or three of your children died of the poison ; 
and suppose you caught the fiend at his work — wouldn't 
you become a persecutor, an inquisitor? Suppose you 
were perfectly convinced that your children must be- 
lieve certain doctrines or suffer eternal torments; and sup- 
pose you had given your entire life in teaching and 
watching, guarding and praying, to make sure that your 
children were safe and sound in the faith ; and suppose that a 
man came into your home and talked heresy with such plausi- 
ble speech that you saw your children's belief wavering, saw 
the imminent danger to their immortal souls — wouldn't you 
resort to harsh measures, if harsh measures were necessary, to 
quench the heretic's voice ? If books and papers of this soul- 
destroying poison came into your home, wouldn't you burn 
them ? If a company of men organized a society for the ex- 
press purpose of preaching and printing and in every way dis- 
seminating the poison of eternal death, wouldn't you approve 
the arrest and punishment, even the execution if necessary, of 
those men ? Well, that is the whole case. Church people 
killed heretics because they believed that heretics were damn- 
ing the souls of their children. 

People used to suppose that their children must believe all 
the doctrines, but the fashion of recent years has been to 
minimize the number. Countless have been the books, ser- 
mons, tracts and editorials on " The Essentials and Non-essen- 
tials," and every new writer takes another doctrine from the 
list of essentials and hurls it over to the growing heap of non- 
essentials. It is perfectly astonishing with how few articles of 
belief the staunchest old-school Presbyterian will manage to 
save his children. The very highest Episcopalian will come 
down to three or four articles of the thirty-nine ; and of the 
Methodist's twenty-six I have seen twenty-five in limbo. 

We have arrived at the time when it is no longer the number 
of essential doctrines, but the principle of essentiality in any 
and all doctrines that is challenged. " The saving power of 
belief" is passing from the thought and soon will pass from the 
speech of men. The idea that men get to Heaven or escape 



90 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

Hell "by faith," is rapidly becoming obsolete. There is no 
merit in belieifler se. The word believer has been sapped of its 
meaning. Religion pertains to the life that now is. Theology, 
like science or music or the fine arts, is a thing of benefit in 
just the degree that it makes men better in this world. Belief 
in the Trinity, as against the Unity, has no more magic to ad- 
mit a dying thief to Paradise than belief in the Italian, as 
against the German, opera. The question that is now asked 
of any and every doctrine is not whether it will save the soul in 
some other world, but whether it will benefit the man in this 
world ; not whether it is Orthodox, or Scriptural, but whether 
it appeals to reason and satisfies the heart. No theology, and 
no denial of theology, is going to live that cannot endure this 
test. 

All magic aside, intelligence and emotion having free sway, 
theologies will suffer, but theology will endure. No doctrine 
is " essential," but many doctrines are useful. We may take 
off the quotation marks and say that many doctrines are intel- 
lectually and morally essential. Do you believe in the exist- 
ence of God ? The question is not whether Moses believed 
that doctrine, or Jesus taught it, but whether you can account 
for the universe without it. Atheism, as well as Theism, is on 
trial. It is, primarily, an appeal to reason. Is it rational that 
the universe came by chance ; or, that a universe of matter 
produced mind ? Is it rational that a heap of stones evolved 
themselves into a company of philosophers ? You smile at the 
old fancy of the transmutation of clay into gold ; but 
how about this new fancy of the transmutation of clay 
into genius ? Have not the Materialists outdone the 
Alchemists? Science itself has given up the theory of 
spontaneous life. Science teaches that there was a time 
when the almost infinite heat of the earth made every 
form of life impossible. Where did life come from ? This 
earth was as dead as a cinder and would have remained forever 
dead had it not been, by some transcendent power, vitalized. 
How will you escape the necessity of putting a capital letter on 
that word Power ? 

If reason is satisfied with nothing less than a personal Crea- 
tor, the heart is not satisfied even with that. The doctrine of 



ECLECTICISM. 97 

Divine Fatherhood may be difficult to prove, but the history of 
the human race is one continued proof that it ought to be 
true. Above this ignorant, toiling, weeping world there ought 
to be a God of infinite compassion and tenderness. Above the 
wars and persecutions and cheatings and tyrannies and ha- 
treds of earth there ought to be a kind, forgiving, indulgent 
Father, who puts his arms around the whole stupid and mis- 
taken race, and lifts it up to a plane where it will have a better 
opportunity. Above all the sickness and misfortune and 
loneliness and bereavement and broken dreams of men there 
ought to be an Infinite Sympathy. No doctrine can be more 
vital to the world's morality and its happiness than this doctrine 
of Divine Fatherhood. 

But, suppose you take the doctrine of the Trinity — is that 
needed to account for the world ? Is there anything in the 
constitution of nature that demands it ? Does reason ask for 
it ? Does it clear up any mysteries ? It heaps mystery on 
mystery. It befogs the mind ; it divorces nature; it perplexes 
reason, and confounds mathematics. Are men any better for 
believing it ? Does it afford a sufferer any comfort to separate 
love and tenderness from the Father and give them to the Son? 
The doctrine has no moral quality, no bearing on ethics. It is 
a Greek speculation, incorporated into the Christian creed, and 
is supposed to have the foundation of a few obscure texts ; but 
no doctrine will much longer stand on a basis so narrow and 
weak. Men will not cease to believe in God because they cease 
to believe the Trinity, any more than a child will cease to love 
its home because it learns that its mother is the real Santa 
Claus. Traditional speculation aside, religion has its own 
glory in the practical influence it wields. Is a man worse, or 
better, for having the spirit of reverence ? Is he more wretched, 
or is he happier, for opening mind and heart to the Eternal 
Wisdom and Love ? Is human life poorer, or richer, for meet- 
ing our neighbors in the sacred services of praise and worship ? 
Are people degraded, or uplifted, by the spiritual aspirations 
and hopes which flood the prayers and hymns, the great poetry 
and philosophy, of the world and which pulse through our 
deepest sorrows like music and light upon the path of a mid- 
night wanderer ? In this way all affirmations and all denials 

i3 



98 PHA SES OF RELIGION IN A M ERICA . 

are to be tested. Are they useful? Do they satisfy reason and 
heart ? 

The courteous householder, of the parable, brought forth 
things new and old for the entertainment of his guests. The 
present age is coming into a like generous humor. Things 
conservative and things radical, things evangelical and things 
heretical, if they serve, are freely appropriated. In medicine, 
this is the age of Cureopathy. Physicians of the old school 
prescribe aconite and belladona. The staunchest Allopathist 
calls for two glasses and a spoon ; while the professed followers 
of Hahnemann approve quinine and are sometimes guilty of 
calomel, I have heard. Mental science is diligently practiced 
in every hospital, under another name, and many a Water-cure 
principle has been stealthily and quietly adopted. The men 
who make use of every advanced idea do not hesitate to bleed, 
if bleeding is necessary. In religion, the world is beginning to 
adopt the same broad principle of common sense. People 
choose what they like out of a dozen systems and freely neglect 
the rest. " I enjoy a ritual," says one, " but I do not believe in 
Apostolic Succession." " I like the fervor and directness of a 
Methodist meeting," says another, "but I think there are many 
people just as good and just as religious who have not been in- 
stantaneously converted." " On many points I am Orthodox," 
says a third, "but I simply cannot believe in endless punish- 
ment." "The Unitarians are right," says a fourth, "in declar- 
ing that salvation is character ; but I still cling to the Divinity 
of Christ and the Inspiration of the Scriptures." " There is 
something very beautiful," says a fifth, "in the religion of the 
Swedenborgians ; but I am not prepared to believe that God 
wrote the Bible in cipher, and kept the cipher a secret for two 
or three thousand years." " I find no fault," says a sixth, 
"with the philosophy of Spiritualism, and I have had a few ex- 
periences which greatly incline me to its phenomena ; but I 
do wish they would tell us something else than stale platitudes 
about the other world." " The Agnostics are doing a grand 
work," says a seventh, " in the interest of morals ; but I think it 
would be a great calamity to slacken our grasp on the life beyond, 
or lose anything of the spirit of prayer and worship." And so 
it goes. People hold a few ideas and principles of their own 



ECLECTICISM. 99 

church, quietly rejecting several others, fearlessly accepting a 
doctrine from this denomination and a sentiment from that — 
making up their religion from many sources. When this crude 
eclecticism is reduced to a science and religious teachers bend 
their thoughts and warm their hearts to the upbuilding of a 
church whose doctrines and services and polity shall be the co- 
ordinated genius of all churches — then will religion become a 
power unto the world's intellectual and moral and spiritual 
salvation. 

Every denomination lives by the power of an exalted virtue. 
It may have many virtues in common with other denominations, 
but its individuality consists in the pre-eminence it gives to 
some single truth. I do not say to some single idea, but to 
some truth, for in their heart of hearts people love truth, and 
the spirit of man cannot live on falsehood. People will endure 
a great deal that is erroneous and bad, if a church feeds their 
souls on some one divine truth. It is not the Trinity, not the 
fear of eternal wrath, not the doctrine of bodily resurrection, 
nor plenary inspiration, but the vivid sense of direct com- 
munion with God, on which the multitudes of the Methodist 
church are religiously fed. Their penitence, which God im- 
mediately hears ; their forgiveness, which He personally grants ; 
their songs of praise, which rise to his throne of grace ; His 
gracious love and life which flow down into their hearts — made 
perfectly receptive by prayer and trust — that is the noble virtue, 
the sublime truth, the enduring power of Methodism. 

Unitarianism, in its lack of organization, its lack of emotion, 
its lack of the democratic spirit in polity and music, its lack of 
devotional earnestness, its lack of missionary aggressiveness, 
its lack of direct and fervent appeal, its barrenness of ritual, its 
failure to arouse the heart except through the reason ; in its de- 
liberation and over-caution and excessive respectability and 
hyper-literary characteristics, it has about all the weaknesses 
that any church could have which made the slightest pretence 
of being the the peoples' church ; and yet, Unitarianism has 
a virtue so exalted, a truth so excellent, in its union of char- 
acter and religion, its amalgamation of conduct and worship, 
its interfusion of purity and praise, that it becomes a source of 
unfailing life and power. 



lOO PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

Ethical Culture is weakness itself in any attempt at minister- 
ing to one full half of the life of man. It has practically 
nothing for that state of mind and that condition of heart to 
which Spiritualism becomes the ministering angel. For the 
strong and the young and the healthy it is a gospel of power ; 
but to the aged and the suffering and the bereaved it brings no 
solace. It so utterly fails to satisfy the longings of love, it 
turns from the despairing cry of a broken heart with such in- 
different hope, that its possible gleams of promise often serve 
but to make the darkness more oppressive. The doctrine of 
immortality is so vitally related to the morals and the happi- 
ness of this world, that any philosophy which does not include 
or calculate upon it, takes the roof from over our heads and 
the foundations from under our feet ; and yet, Ethical Culture 
makes its one appeal with such true voice and with such prac- 
tical and unerring thrust; it turns such a flood of light on 
earthly duties and insists so nobly upon righteousness in feel- 
ing as well as conduct; it presses home the obligations of 
brotherhood and sympathy with such human warmth and 
glow, that the world could in no wise afford the absence of this 
brave evangel. Where Spiritualism halts and falters, Agnostic- 
ism rises and marches on with giant tread. It may yet learn 
that man is the citizen of two worlds — of this, in his duties ; of 
the future, in his dreams — and that entire absorption in either 
world is a fatal incompleteness. Because the past has been too 
other-worldly, there is great temptation to become worldly. 
Because ignorance and crime have been companions of the 
larger belief, the wise and the pure do often suspect belief. 
Because the doctrine of future torment has been made the ful- 
crum of bad leverage against the virtues and the sciences of 
the world, candid men grow timid and scarce venture the hope 
of future happiness. "Because there has been so much evil 
theology, reformers are afraid of all theology. Because Heaven 
has been so long preached as the reward of credulity, good 
men shrink from claiming it as the reward of merit. Because 
so much that was called worship has been the demands of 
selfishness and the assumptions of bigotry, modest men forget 
that trained intellects and cultured emotions are the best and 



ECLECTICISM. 101 

most natural condition for communion with the All Perfect. 
Because much of religion has been an external affair, dealing 
with rites and traditions, spiritual men forget that the soul 
itself, the interior kingdom of thoughts and feelings, is the 
peculiar province of the Infinite Spirit. 

The Catholic and Episcopal churches, with their positive- 
ness about the future, with their unquestioned authority on 
matters of doctrine and form, with their priestly command of 
the private lives of people, have gone far toward making popu- 
lar intelligence needless. On the other hand, Theism has ap- 
pealed almost exclusively to intelligence. It neglects the 
heart, as they neglect the head. They have an organization 
which extends not only to churches and services and charities, 
but to the very methods of thought and feeling. People find 
their ideas, as well as their ritual, finished, systematized, wait- 
ing acceptance and repetition. The grooves of sentiment also 
are deeply and smoothly worn, so that emotions easily slip 
into them and flow along — a mild portion being required of 
every worshiper — more, or greater, not quite allowable — a 
ready-made religion, as a factory is ready for each man and 
child to take his place and become a part of the machinery, 
when the bell strikes. Theism scarcely has a place for children 
or child-like people at all. Its worship is a philosophical con- 
templation. Its emotions are those of the poet and the musi- 
cian. The Catholics and Episcopals, with their splendid, sense- 
captivating ritualism, win the multitudes and give them a 
training in reverence and in the sense of sacredness. Theism 
is the teacher of teachers, wholly neglecting the multitudes. 
Ritualism is a broad salvation for the masses. Philosophism 
is a high salvation for the thinkers. The thoughtful need 
more ritualism, more drilling of religious emotions, more de- 
mocracy of sentiment and action. The masses need more 
rationalism, more teaching, more intellectual activity and inde- 
pendence. When will the great virtues of both be united, and 
the weaknesses of both confessed and abandoned ? 

Puritanism and Universalism, like Ritualism and Theism, 
like Ethical Culture and Spiritualism, like Unitarianism and 
Methodism, are antipodes. Puritanism appeals to justice; 
Universalism to love. Puritanism rests upon the decrees of 



102 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

God; Universalism on his generosity. The Puritan placed 
the fatherhood of God in a foot-note ; the Universalist wrote 
his entire book of it. The back-ground of every Puritan ser- 
mon was eternal wrath; the outlook from every Universalist 
sermon was infinite pleasure. The one hardened sensibility ; 
the other lulled it. Puritanism gave the impression that God 
would not do his part ; Universalism gave the impression that 
God would do his part and ours too. Puritanism pointed to 
death as the end of the sinner's hope; Universalism pointed to 
death as the beginning of the sinner's hope. The one was the 
roaring of a lion ; the other was the song of a lark. Both 
have greatly modified, as they greatly needed to. The wrath 
and gloom of early Puritanism and the " death and glory " senti- 
ment of early Universalism were alike discouraging to our 
human duties. Men need to feel that God's command is upon 
them, in this and all worlds, to do right ; and they equally need 
to feel that when they have done right, in this or any world, 
God will reward them. To deny the Divine Compassion, or to 
presume upon it, is fatal to the best interests of humanity. 

The building of the true church will be the co-ordination of 
the virtues of all churches, the framing together of those 
supreme truths, each of which, in its turn, has crowned some 
great religious movement. There are many denominations 
just because the starved heart or the unsatisfied reason kept 
reaching out for the food hitherto denied it. We are learning 
that in many instances we have lost as well as gained some- 
thing needful. If ritualism did not entirely satisfy, neither 
does rationalism meet all our wants. It takes a long time to 
understand that there is no such thing as a panacea. Ex- 
perience will at last teach that simple truth. A perfectly rea- 
sonable theology, a supreme and absolute conception of God's 
love, an unshaken conviction that our friends live on in the 
spirit world, a thoroughly consistent method of cultivating 
morals — any of these alone will no more complete our human 
life than will the fervor of revivalism or a constant partici- 
pation in the " service." It is very stupid to say that the 
world ought to be satisfied with Episcopalianism, or Method- 
ism, or Unitarianism, or Ethical Culture. People have hungry 
minds and hungry hearts as well ; they enjoy rhythm and 



ECLECTICISM. 103 

poetry in all things, even in worship; they are awake to the 
voice of human helpfulness. Our nature is such a multiform 
thing, we have such diverse wants, the wonder is that any but 
a most singularly developed man, or an unmitigated crank, can 
be happy under the ministrations of any one church. If thea- 
tres presented nothing but tragedy, or nothing but comedy ; if 
colleges taught nothing but history, or nothing but mathe- 
matics ; if people wore nothing but white, or nothing but 
black ; if the sky was forever cloudless, or if the sun never 
shone; if all leaves were the same shape and all flowers the 
same color and all houses of one pattern and all voices of the 
same tone, what an unbearable world this would be ! And yet 
there are churches which expect people to be happy in, to get 
wholesome morality and piety out of, an endless repetition of 
the same service or an endless exhortation of the same great 
philosophy. The glory of the year is the changing seasons. 
The power of the religion that is to be will be found in its 
round-about ministrations to the various needs and faculties of 
men. A church that should present an elaborate ritual on the 
first Sunday of the month, with an evolution essay-sermon in 
the evening ; which should give a warming, comforting, worship- 
ful discourse, the second Sunday, with a popular song- 
service in the evening; which would furnish a doctrinal ser- 
mon of profound thought and wide scope, the third Sunday, 
with a sacred concert, of the best talent, in the evening ; which 
should provide a mixed service of devotion and practical ap- 
peal for the fourth Sunday, with an historic or illustrated 
lecture in the evening ; and which should give the fifth Sun- 
day, as often as it occurred, to ethical culture and home 
mission work — that church would be on the way toward the 
universal church — the kind of universalism that people need. 

Our doctrines, our sentiments and our polity need broaden- 
ing till they encompass every power on which the various de- 
nominations have flourished. We need the recognition of 
Divine Sovereignty and the relentless moral convictions which 
the Puritans preached. We need to feel that God's hand is 
not slack, that He means to have his will obeyed. We are 
coming to that again, from the scientific instead of the textual 
standpoint. The absolute necessity of keeping the law we are 



104 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

also learning from science. This new Puritanism, with the 
gloom and the hatred and the boorishness left out, we cannot 
afford to fail of incorporating in our theology. 

We need the Methodist fervor and individuality, the sense of 
personal responsibility and duty, the feeling that in a wonder- 
ful degree our destinies are in our own keeping, the direct 
prayer for God's intimate grace to aid and comfort. Science 
inclines us all the while to study men in the mass ; to see them 
as the objects of great laws, moved in bodies by unitary forces ; 
to speak and think of them in solidarities. We are quite in 
danger of loss on the side of personal relationship with the 
personal God. The spirit of Methodism, shorn of its absurd 
theories about conversion, but pleading the true and penitent 
and devout and triumphant conversion, will save us from the 
fatal loss which threatens. 

We need the ecclesiastical culture of the Episcopalians. A 
ritual, with medievalism left out, would be a power in our 
liberal churches. If we are to have any form at all in our Sun- 
day services, any prayer or hymn or reading of Scripture, 
there is no reason why the little or much that we have should 
not be in good form, in the best, most pleasing, most capti- 
vating form. 

We need the Universalist thought of God's love and father- 
hood, the Universalist conviction that creation is not a mistake, 
nor life a failure, nor providence an apology, nor death the 
limit of Divine ability. This conviction, based on something 
wider than a disputed or undisputed text, and preached in con- 
nection with a complete system of religious instruction and life, 
not as a denominational fad ; this governing thought of love 
as the crown of a philosophy — a resultant universal from uni- 
versal premises — the future church will scarcely fail to adopt. 

We need everything that Unitarianism has — its theology, its 
literature, its culture. What it has is right. It is a peculiarly 
fortunate church in not having a great load of things that are 
wrong. It is unfortunate in lacking the elements of popular 
appeal and inspiration. This is not a case wherein popular 
means inferior. Methodism, Episcopalianism and Spiritualism 
can fill out the shortcomings of the Unitarians. 



ECLECTICISM. 108 

We need that most advanced form of Unitarian theology — 
Theism — that God is the soul, and not the carpenter, of the 
universe ; that his immanence is so absolute as to nullify the 
very idea of transcendence, except as the spirit transcends the 
body it vitalizes. When we understand that Theism finds God 
not simply in rocks and trees and physical laws and forces, but 
in all the purities and prophesies of the human spirit, a God 
who is in all, we shall get over the pantheistic fright and shall 
simply have an infinite conception of the Jewish Jehovah, or 
Methodist God, or Universalist Father — the personalness made 
limitless. 

We need the great living convictions of Spiritualism — that 
spirits cannot die, that death is not a terror, that life beyond is 
real and practical, that progress is unending. It is a puerile 
and cowardly thing that churches hug the faith they secretly 
get from Spiritualists, and in all public ways " pass by on the 
other side." Spiritualism is partly to blame, and in some 
measure deserves this treatment, but it is fast working its own 
social regeneration — having read the story of Old Dog Tray with 
profit. It is only just to say, however, that without organ- 
ization the true could not be responsible for the false, and the 
field of investigation was such as could easily be converted into 
a field of assumption. This doctrine has about passed through 
its apprenticeship and is here to be our teacher in its peculiar 
realm. We all need its teaching. 

We need the genius of the Ethical Culture movement, the 
candor and bravery of the Agnostics, and their yearning to 
make this world our Heaven — one of our Heavens. To bring 
in the Kingdom here, without losing hold on that which is to 
come ; to bend our energies to the salvation of men, physically, 
socially, intellectually, politically, financially, morally, without 
forgetting the culture of reverence and hope ; and with the 
sacred sense that we are co-workers with God in all this, and 
most truly serving him by means of it ; and with the worship- 
ful feeling also that He is in us, in those we help, in the laws 
of influence by which we help them, in the truth and the virtue 
we impart, the life and sustenance of all — that would be com- 
pleteness. 

14 



106 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA, 



THE PROBLEM. 

The skepticism of this age is the result of kindness. Moral 
sense and fine feeling beget doubt. Benevolence is the mother 
of heresy. A man who has been attending the Presbyterian 
Church all his life, and who, like the majority of church mem- 
bers, has been happily ignorant of the creed he promised to be- 
lieve, is aroused by the newspaper hue and cry, and determines 
to read his profession of faith. He gets a copy of the West- 
minster Confession, reads it, ponders it, and is horrified. He 
reads there of a God who will eternally torture good people 
and little children because they were born in China or ancient 
Rome, and never heard of Christ. He rubs his eyes to make 
sure he is not dreaming, and says, " What ! Is that my creed ! 
Is that the kind of a God the Presbyterian Church believes in ! 
Why, if there's a being in this universe that would do such in- 
famous things, I should say that being were the Devil, not 
God." 

Let us suppose that on the following Sunday that man at- 
tends Universalist preaching. He hears it proclaimed that 
God is a father, who loves all his children ; that an infant is 
not to blame for the unelect condition of its parents ; that 
a good man should not even be hanged, much less tortured 
forever, for being born several centuries before Christ come 
into the world ; that for bad people, even, God has infinite sym- 
pathy, and that He will be careful to give those a much better 
chance hereafter who had poor opportunities here. Let us sup- 
pose that our layman is quite soundly converted by the Uni- 
versalist sermon to which he has listened ; that he walks home 
saying, " That is a sensible theology — that is an idea of God 
which a man with a heart in him can accept — why did it never 
before occur to me that God would be as good to his children 
as I am to mine ? — what an awful thought that a father, the 
Heavenly Father, could torture his own little girls !" He is 
thinking of his little girls at home in bed. Let us suppose 



THE PROBLEM. 107 

that our layman, on arriving home, repeats the sermon to his 
wife ; that he closes his own discourse by asking the wife if she 
could take one of the children out of bed and shut her up in 
an iron box, and build a fire under her, and slowly roast her to 
death. The unconvinced wife protests: "God does not do 
that ; He only allows the Devil to do it ;" but the husband re- 
sponds : "God created the Devil; why does He not destroy 
him, and put a stop to such work ? Could we stand idly by 
and see an enemy torture our children ? Would we even al- 
low them to torture themselves ? Oh, no, my dear ! The direct 
issue cannot be avoided : either God can prevent the endless 
agonies of Hell and will not ; or He would like to prevent 
them, but cannot. In one case He is not good ; in the other 
case He is not omnipotent. The only way out of such awful 
dilemma is to believe that his love is equal to his power ; that 
He will be a kind father to all his children ; that there are no 
endless agonies of Hell." 

Let us suppose that a sudden transformation is wrought in 
the wife's ideas also, and that husband and wife together are 
beginning to take sweet comfort in the belief that God's heart 
is as loving, and his arms as tender, as their own, in the care of 
his children — I must caution them that it is not all clear sailing 
on the ocean of theology yet. Suppose they kneel by the chil- 
dren's bed, where the little girls are sleeping so sweetly — no 
other scene on earth arouses such infinite tenderness as a sleep- 
ing child— and a silent prayer of gratitude wells up in the 
hearts of that father and mother. * * * But the door bell 
is jerked nervously, and that mother has a presentment which 
does not allow her to wait the slow steps of a servant ; she 
hurries to open the door herself. There stands a thin, pale, 
haggard, ragged woman, with a face of unutterable grief ; and 
before any questions can be asked, the ragged mother of the 
street pours forth her story of wretchedness. Her husband 
was a day laborer ; he had worked at the same trade from his 
childhood ; knew how to do nothing else ; the factory in which 
he worked, with all other factories of the same kind, were 
formed into a trust; this particular factory was closed and the 
men set adrift ; this poor woman's husband went in search of 
work, tramping from city to city, by week and by month ; in a 



108 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA . 

distant part of the country he was taken sick ; they put him in 
the poor house and he died. This mother had washed and 
scrubbed for her children's bread ; she could not pay the rent ; 
she had to take one room in a filthy tenement; her eldest 
daughter was a pretty girl, and vain ; wanted nice things to 
wear, like other girls ; she was led away into temptation, and 
ruined, and is gone, nobody knows where ; the little children 
got sick ; the doctor wrote prescriptions, but she could not buy 
medicine; it was not medicine they needed anyhow, half as 
much as it was wholesome food and warm clothing and pure 
air, none of which she could furnish them ; one of them died, 
more of starvation than of disease; another was at the point 
of death ; the poor mother had nursed them for weeks on less 
than half a meal a day for herself, on less than two hours' sleep 
a night ; and now her strength and reason alike failed her — and 
the wretched woman threw herself on the floor and cried out : 
" Oh, they tell me there is a God, a Heavenly Father, who 
cares for his children ; where is He now, when my little ones 
are being starved and ruined ! Why did He not guide my 
honest husband to a place where he could find work ! If God 
is good and kind why does He allow me to suffer so !" 



That is the problem ; and it is now the Universalist's turn to 
explain. If I may stand up triumphantly and ask a Presby- 
terian to explain how a good God can permit eternal suffering 
in the next world ; the Atheist may turn upon me, with the 
same air of triumph, and ask me to explain how a good God 
will permit such horrible sufferings in this world. " Either 
God can prevent this awful suffering of the poor, and will not ; 
or He would like to prevent it, but cannot. In one case He is 
not good ; in the other case He is not omnipotent." 

How shall I answer the Atheist? When I apply that argu- 
ment to endless pain, the Presbyterian answers me by calling 
me a destructive critic, a disbeliever in the Bible ; and by tell- 
ing people they should not listen to such dangerous preaching. 
I shall not answer the Atheist with like abuse and evasion. 
This is a problem that we must face candidly and seriously. If 
we cannot solve it we must confess our inability to do so. If 
we have any solution we must put it forth, or we may as well 



THE PROBLEM. 1O0 

close our churches. The continuance of worship, the very ex- 
istence of all reverential feeling, depends on the Christian re- 
ply to this query, " How can a good God allow his children to 
starve?" Universalists are singled out, by the nature of their 
own ethical and benevolent appeals, as the people whose su- 
preme and immediate duty it is td meet the benevolent doubts 
of the Atheist. If the Heavenly Father would not allow mil- 
lions of dimpled babies to be tortured in Hell forever, why 
does He allow millions of them to sicken and starve, to be 
neglected and beaten, to exist in rags and filth, to grow up in 
the midst of ignorance and vice and brutality in this world ? 
He does allow it. It may be a theory that confronts the Pres- 
byterian ; but it is a condition, and not a theory, that confronts 
us. We may solve the Presbyterian dilemma by denying the 
alleged facts ; but no power of mental science will be able to 
" deny away " these facts. If there is a Heavenly Father why 
does He not prevent this awful suffering of earth ? Why does 
He not, immediately, with whatever outlay of miracles, put a 
stop to it? Why did He ever allow it? Curing it now would 
not atone for the horrors of the past. Why did He create 
a world into which He knew this awful suffering would 
come ? These questions are not irreverent — except to the 
ignorant who have not suffered. But even if they were, they 
must be answered, and they must be answered rationally, or 
faith in God and the worship of him are doomed. 

To these hard questions I believe there is a reasonable and 
loving reply — a reply that will save religion from scorn — a re- 
ply that will clear the character of God in present providence, 
just as Universalism has cleared it in the better view of future 
providence. The reply to these facts is not, however, of the 
sweeping and crushing kind that Universalism makes to the 
theory of endless punishment. There is no compact bit of 
logic that one can hurl back upon the Atheist to overwhelm 
and confuse him, as we can overwhelm and confuse the Pres- 
byterian. " If God can prevent eternal suffering and does not, 
He is not good. If He would like to prevent it, but cannot, 
He is not omnipotent." The Universalist can heave that 
bomb into the orthodox camp and await the explosion with 
calm confidence. When the Atheist substitutes the word 



1 1 PHA SES OF RELIGION IN A M ERIC A . 

"human" for the word "eternal," and hurls the same bomb 
into our camp, we must call for a parley. We have reached a 
point where the argument cannot be compacted into one 
blazing and destructive sentence. We must go out under flag 
of truce and beg an interview. 



Suppose that God undertook, by miraculous interferences, 
to relieve the human race of suffering — to show, by overt acts 
of kindness, that He is good. Suppose God had worked a 
miracle to guide that wandering husband to a place where he 
could get work ; another miracle to prevent the ruin of that 
pretty girl ; another miracle to keep the children of that 
wretched mother from getting sick — five hundred other fami- 
lies were in the same condition by the shutting down of that 
factory. Suppose God had worked ten or a dozen miracles for 
each family, so that no extra suffering would have resulted 
from the formation of that trust ; what would have been the 
theological result ? Say there were 500 families thrown out of 
support ; make it ten miracles to the family ; would those 5,000 
miracles, worked in the space of two or three weeks, have 
proven to the world that God is good ? 

We must first determine whether or not the miracles are to 
be recognized as such. Suppose that God worked those 
5,000 miracles in a secret way, so that nobody suspected, 
or, at least, so that nobody could prove any miracle in the 
case. The men who lost their places, in a few days se- 
cured other and better places ; what would they say ? They 
would say, " That was splendid luck ; the unions are getting to 
be a power in the world." What would the politicians have 
said ? They would have said, " Our American system of pro- 
tection has done marvels for the workingman." It would not 
occur to anybody that God was caring for these men who lost 
their places, just as it occurred to nobody that God was caring 
for them while they had their places. Suppose you had sug- 
gested to those men, toiling in the factories at two dollars a day, 
that God was caring for them and their families ; would they 
not have responded : " What ! Divine care, at the rate of two 
dollars a day, and we working ten hours a day to secure it!" 
Suppose they had been getting five dollars a day, and not a dol- 



THE PROBLEM. Ill 

lar of doctor's bill in five years ; and you suggested Divine care. 
They would have said: "We are experts. We studied and 
practiced a long time to fit ourselves for the work which com- 
mands high wages. There is our employer, who clears a hun- 
dred dollars a day, whose home is a palace, whose family travel 
in Europe, whose luxuries would make several of us feel rich ; 
if Providence means to do anything for us let our condition be 
made equal to that." Go to the employer, who was a workman 
ten years ago, at five dollars a day, and who has gotten rich, 
and intimate to him that a few miracles had been vouchsafed 
to place him where he is ; and he will smile at you. He remem- 
bers how he experimented, night after night, till two or three 
o'clock in the morning, after performing his day's task ; how he 
lived on almost nothing and put his wages into those experi- 
ments ; how he racked his brain till he was nearly crazy, before 
he finally worked out the invention which brought wealth to 
his purse. God might have worked a hundred secret miracles 
to aid that man with his invention ; but the man, knowing 
nothing of them, must, of course, take the credit himself. He 
knows that he worked hard, studied diligently, planned care- 
fully, and succeeded. Knowing nothing more, he finds no 
special proof in his success that God has been good to him. 
People do not, cannot, see the care of a Heavenly Father, 
though He work millions of secret miracles to help them along. 
What do they see ? They see the lack of Divine care in those 
cases where suffering and want still exist. 

It is said there are 1,000,000 able-bodied men in America who 
cannot find employment. Suppose that God worked enough 
secret miracles to help 900,000 of them into positions. Since 
nobody knew that a miracle had been worked, the Atheist has 
his argument still unbroken. Here are 100,000 men unpro- 
vided for. If God is good, why does He not assist them ? If 
all but 10,000, or 10, should be provided for by secret miracles, 
the case were still the same. We may imagine that God is 
working millions of unseen miracles every day to save men 
from want ; but while one man suffers the Atheist has his ar- 
gument. If God had worked so many millions of miracles, 
every hour, that in ten years there had not been a single case of 
suffering in the world ; not one accident in which anybody was 



112 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

killed ; not one girl, anywhere on the earth, assaulted by a 
brutal tramp ; not a single case of poisoning by accident, or of 
drowning at any summer resort, or of maiming by a runaway ; 
and then, if a yacht were overturned and a young man 
drowned, or if some child were bitten by a mad dog, or if half 
a dozen persons were consumed in a burning theatre, Robert 
Ingersoll would shout forth, " Where was your God !" If you 
suggested that there might have been miracles of care all 
through these years of supreme fortune, he would reply* 
" Certainly not ; else why did God slack his hand ? If He 
saved the rest He would save these. It has been human genius 
and care that gave us such fortune ; and when human care and 
genius fail there is none to help." 



Well, suppose we were not left in doubt; suppose a miracle 
had been worked openly in such a way that everybody, even 
Ingersoll, recognized it as a miracle, in aid of that suffering 
woman, whose case I have detailed. Suppose, when her hus- 
band was walking along the crowded street in New York, that 
an angel descended from the sky — that 50,000 people gathered 
in the street to see and hear that angel — that the angel singled 
out this wandering husband, and led him to a shop, and told 
the boss to this man, and that the boss hired him, and gave 
him better wages than he had before. Suppose that all those 
50,000 spectators were convinced, beyond the shadow of a 
doubt, that God sent his angel to assist that one man. How 
would the case stand then ? That one man and his family 
would believe with exceeding joy in God's fatherly care — but 
how about the other 999,999, to whom the angel did not come ? 
Wouldn't they feel that Providence was exceedingly narrow 
and stingy? Wouldn't they feel that God was not a Universal 
Father at all, but a most whimsical and unsympathetic despot, 
who singled out one sufferer and helped him, and left all the 
rest, who were just as needy and just as good, to starve ? That 
would be the worst possible comment on the character of God. 
If He helped one, He must help all. But if, by millions of 
miracles, God helped all the starving to bread and clothes and 
shelter — that would not remedy the case one whit. That would 
not prevent human suffering. There are other causes of 



THE PROBLEM. 118 

suffering, deeper, more bitter, more terrible, than business 
misfortune. 

I go into homes where there is everything that money can 
buy, but where there is more awful suffering than ever came 
from the lack of money — a drunken son — a wayward husband 
— a child that was born a cripple and all whose days have been 
days of agony to itself and its parents— a wife in her palace 
who is not loved— or a husband whose wife is not respected — a 
woman, with husband and little children about her, with every- 
thing to make life happy, but with a fatal, lingering disease 
which keeps that mother to a bed of pain and drags her wearily 
down to death — a young man, pride of the household, who is 
attacked by some illness that undermines his reason and sends 
him to the mad-house — there are a thousand causes of suffer- 
ing besides the want of money. 

If God, with open and confessed miracles, relieved all finan- 
cial want, would He not also be obliged to cure, nay, to prevent 
all sickness, in order to show that He is the universal Father ? 
One single miracle, anywhere in the history of the world, would 
demand millions of miracles every hour, or men would rebel, 
and justly so, against the Divine partiality. 

Not only would God be obliged to prevent all sickness, 
but He must prevent all accidents ; He must not allow 
a rotten bridge to fall down when people are driving 
over it. He must not allow a can of kerosene to explode 
when a lazy servant kindles the fire with it. He must not 
allow two railroad trains to collide when a sleepy conductor 
fails to hear the order or a drunken switchman turns the 
wrong switch. He must not allow any careless father to take 
cold and get pneumonia when he hurries to his office in a per- 
spiration and takes off his coat and sits in a draft. He must 
not allow any child to fall down the stairs and injure its spine 
when a fashionable mother goes off shopping seven hours in 
the day, and leaves the child with a good-for-nothing nurse 
who goes off flirting with a good-for-nothing policeman. If 
God is going to prevent human suffering, He must do every- 
thing that human genius and care may be supposed to accom- 
plish. He must not allow any nurse to be good-for-nothing. 
He must not allow the wind to blow upon any perspiring man, 

15 



114 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

or He must so change the laws of nature that the man cannot 
take cold. He must not allow any switchman to get drunk. 
He must not allow any whiskey to be manufactured, or He 
must work several millions of miracles a minute in that par- 
ticular line, to take the intoxicating properties out of whiskey. 
He must not allow any horse to get frightened and run away. 
He must not allow any piece of timber in any bridge to rot. 
He must not allow any bolt or brace of iron to rust off. He 
must not allow any car-axle or wheel to crystalize back from 
steel into iron. He must not allow morphine to poison any- 
body when a stupid clerk makes a mistake in the prescription. 
Every moment of the world He must change the laws of 
nature. Gravity must not be gravity. Poison must not be poison. 
Electricity must cease to be electricity when a lineman touches 
the cable. Chemistry shall not work. Fire shall not burn. 
Water shall not drown. Powder shall not explode. A knife 
shall not cut. There shall be no such things as the laws of 
nature. Matter and force shall not preserve their qualities a 
single hour. Science, of course, would be impossible. 
Knowledge would be impossible. Men might just as well 
build a railroad bridge of rye straws as of steel bars, 
God must not let it break. You might just as well 
drink morphine as water. You could eat powdered glass with 
the same impunity that you eat bread. You could shovel live 
coals into a powder house. You could allow babies to play 
with razors and loaded revolvers and rattlesnakes. If God is 
going to do everything, men would soon do nothing. Edison 
may just as well put a stick of wood as a stick of carbon in his 
lamps. God must not allow the lights to go out. Edison 
needn't make any lamps, or put up any wires, or think out any 
invention. Once God takes the matter in hand, and works by 
miracle, we can have electric lights growing on the trees as the 
apples do. In such a world — where God made good all human 
failures with constant miracles — it would be utter nonsense for 
man to attempt anything. There would be no need of work, 
no need of thought, no need of schools, no need of factories or 
stores or railroads or farms — let everything be done miracu- 
lously. No need of any moral discipline, either— all a foolish 
waste of time to train your children in good habits — God 



THE PROBLEM. 11B 

wouldn't let them do anything that might cause pain or shame. 
No need of learning or study — God would not allow the densest 
ignorance to lead any man into a mistake. The most ignorant 
were just as safe as the most wise ; the worst as happy as the 
best. The whole human race might turn themselves loose, and 
lie on the grass, or go fishing; absolutely cease their toil and 
their thinking ; doing anything they pleased ; eating, drinking, 
fighting, debauching, year in and year out — nothing but peace 
and joy and health and prosperity could come of it. That is 
what Brother Pentecost and Colonel Ingersoll demand when 
they cry out : " Where was God when that child fell and hurt 
itself? Where was God when that railroad train was wrecked ? 
Where was God when that woman went hungry ? " This entire 
universe must be managed arbitrarily, by miracle, by millions 
of miracles every moment, so that there could be no such 
thing as natural law and no such thing as human knowledge ; 
or else the entire universe must be managed absolutely without 
miracle in any case, according to immutable laws. It must be 
this universe, or an altogether different universe. 



If God did everything for us we should be, not men, not in- 
telligent beings at all, not moral beings at all, but grown-up 
babies. Under the case as it is — man being required to look 
out for himself — though he suffer, he is learning to do and to 
be something worth while. It is a question of building up in- 
dividuality, of evolving mind and moral power, with suffering ; 
or of perfect ease and physical plenty, with no intellect, no 
moral or mental life, no individual force. 

It is absurd to say that God is not omnipotent because He 
cannot do both. Omnipotence, even, cannot make black and 
white to be the same color. Wisdom is the result of experience, an 
experience in which men are compelled by suffering to study and 
learn. We cannot have that experience and not have it at the 
same time. God must make a choice of methods — a choice of 
results. He must choose to prevent all human suffering, in 
which case He would also prevent all human intellect ; or 
He must create a world in which intellect will be developed at 
the expense of suffering. It is simply a question whether the 



1 1 6 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

mental and moral and affectional powers developed here are suf- 
ficient to compensate the pain. 

Is it better to suffer, and evolve these spiritual faculties ? 
Would it be better to live a purely animal life, without suffer- 
ing, without mind, without love? Would it be better if the 
human race had not been created at all ? 

There are two methods by which God might prevent human 
suffering. He might every moment change the laws of nature 
and the nature of things to avoid the consequences of man's 
blundering ; or, He might send an all-wise angel to each hu- 
man being, to take that person by the hand and lead him 
through life, as you lead your little child through a machine 
shop or over a narrow bridge. In either case, human knowl- 
edge, human character, human progress, would be forever im- 
possible. 

God cannot give us wisdom. He can only give us opportunity. 
When your child is sick, you cannot take medicine for it ; you 
cannot get well for it. If it is ignorant, you cannot learn 
geography and history for it ; you cannot give it the knowledge 
and the caution to keep it out of danger. You can only pro- 
vide the means by which it may learn. If you carried it in 
your arms till it was ten or twenty years of age, it could not 
then walk. It must use its own muscles. Likewise, it must 
use its own brain ; it must use its own conscience ; or it will 
never have wisdom and moral ability. 

Now, what can you do towards educating your boy — towards 
making a man of him ? You can provide the public school and 
put him into it. He must get the lessons. He must have the fric- 
tion with other boys. He must learn how to make friends, 
how to conduct himself, so as to keep out of trouble. You can 
provide the high school and the college for him ; but he must 
take the honors, if any are taken ; he must be a gentleman, if 
he would be respected — your reputation cannot shield him. 
When his college days are over, you can have a place in the 
business for him ; but he must have the genius and the ambi- 
tion to fill that place, or all that you can possibly do for him is 
in vain. 

If God meant to make anything of our minds, our souls, our 
characters, He must put us in a dangerous world, and give us 



THE PROBLEM. 1 1 7 

liberty, and allow us to suffer from our mistakes, to learn by 
our failures, to grow strong by effort, to become wise and good 
by this constant struggle to keep the law. 

It does not impugn the Divine wisdom, it is no criticism 
on the Divine power, that God cannot create a little child 
with the genius of a Shakespeare or the political wisdom of a 
Webster. Wisdom and genius require time, require study, 
require the use of memory and reason, require a wide observa- 
tion of facts and men and motives, require a vast and deep 
experience of joy and sorrow. 



I do not mean that all sorrow is providential — that every 
isolated case of pain or grief will bring its reward. Every day, 
in every family, in each one's experience, there are sufferings 
which come to no good end, which are simply a loss. 

A gentleman asked me if I believed there was a purpose 
in all things, and I replied : " Yes ; I believe there is a pur- 
pose in all things, but not a purpose in each thing." I meant 
this : That in every class of facts there is a Divine purpose ; 
but there is no special purpose in this or that particular fact of 
the class. For instance, there is a purpose — two purposes — in 
the blossoms of an apple tree. Apple blossoms are exquisitely 
beautiful, they are sweet and delicate beyond compare ; they 
administer to man's artistic sense and to his moral refinement. 
They also protect the budding fruit from insects and frost and 
blasting winds. There, in a general way, is the scientific pur- 
pose and the moral purpose. But, suppose there is an apple 
tree in the midst of some wild forest, where no human eye 
penetrates, and in a climate where no apple can ripen. It minis- 
ters to no culture of the spirit, it produces no fruit ; but every 
springtime that faithful tree covers itself with beautiful, use- 
less, wasted blossoms. There is no special purpose in the 
blossoms of that tree. 

The purpose is in the result, not in the incidents and hap- 
penings by the way. You will go to your office in New York 
to-morrow morning. You will have a very definite purpose in 
traveling to your office ; but if there are five cars in the train 
you will have no special purpose in taking the second car 
rather than the third ; when you enter the ferryboat you will 



1 1 8 PHA SES OF RELIGION IN A M ERICA . 

have no purpose in taking one rather than any other of fifty 
different seats ; as you walk up the street you will have no pur- 
pose in stepping upon this particular flagstone or that special 
block of the pavement. You perform a thousand acts every 
day, little, incidental actions, in which you have no special pur- 
pose. You might perform each act in a different manner with- 
out at all affecting the ultimate and real purpose of your day's 
toil. In every class of actions there is a purpose, but in 
multitudes of the single actions there is no purpose. 

In every great class of nature's actions— which are God's 
acts — there is a purpose ; but in the thousands and millions of 
individual and special facts of nature there is no purpose. In 
the universal law that apple trees shall put forth blossoms there 
are the poetic and the scientific purposes that we have noted. 
There is no purpose in the fact that a given tree has a hundred 
more or a hundred fewer blossoms this year than it had last ; 
or that a particular bloom on one twig is more highly colored, 
has a lovelier tinge of that indescribable pink, than a bloom on 
another twig. These are the results of special, local condi- 
tions, which have no bearing on the general plan. 

God works by universal laws, not by small and local adapta- 
tions. Certainly there is design in the great law of vegeta- 
ble life and growth ; but that wide-sweeping law which gives 
flowers and fruits and harvests and forests, also has millions of 
local results in stinging nettles and ugly insects, in gnarled and 
knotted branches, wherein we may see no purpose. Certainly 
there is design in this universal law of animal life; but the 
flow of that vast current of life, which gives horses, cattle, birds, 
fishes, furs, and all useful creatures, also has, as it were, swirl- 
ing eddies and stagnant bayous that produce noxious beasts 
and pestiferous insects, for which we may see no purpose. 
Certainly there is design in the great fact that a large portion 
of the earth's surface is covered with water, but I can see 
no design in the accidental geological formation called the 
" Newark Meadows," nor in the mosquitos they produce. 
You have a design in building your house, but no design in the 
dust and rubbish that litter the sidewalk and make pedestrian- 
ism uncomfortable for the meantime. The power of human 
speech is a divine gift, with a noble purpose ; but there is no 



THE PROBLEM. 1 1 9 

providential design in the vile word uttered by some insolent 
fellow on the street corner. General Grant had a design in 
massing soldiers around Richmond — perhaps you were 
there and know what it was — but his design did not extend to 
the fact that your coffee boiled over at some hasty meal before 
a guard mount. In the onward sweep of any great purpose, 
human or Divine, there will be countless, incidental, local facts, 
results, happenings, that are simply accidents by the way, mis- 
fortunes, peculiarities, into which the very thought of purpose 
or design cannot enter. 

But for human suffering there would have been no science of 
medicine, none of the knowledge and skill and patience and 
mastery of nature which has come of the noble study of reme- 
dies. But for human suffering it is hardly too much to say 
there would have been no development of science along any 
line of investigation. The need of getting bodily comfort and 
various forms of helpfulness demanded the close scrutiny of 
facts, the careful study of laws and forces, the tireless obser- 
vation and research, the wondrous drill of man's perceptive 
faculties and his reason, the marvelous growth of intelligence, 
which modern science has conferred. But for human suffering 
there would have been no trade, no commerce, no mechanical 
inventions, no merchant fleets, no cities, no pioneers into new 
countries seeking gold and wheat fields, none of this modern 
quickness and ambition, none of this trading and intermingling 
of nations, none of this broad knowledge of the earth and of 
man, none of this far-reaching sense of brotherhood, which 
machines and commerce have developed. But for human want 
and suffering there would have been no science of politics, no 
combinations of men for defence and trade, none of the brain- 
power and the wide grasp of social problems, none of the 
practical work of statesmanship, none of the solid literature of 
sociology, which the formation and growth of nations have 
required. But for human suffering there would have been no 
great poets, no great philosophers, none of the classic literature 
of the ages — for the best of it all is but the out-reaching hunger 
of the mind for a solution of this very problem of pain. No 
literature, then no education, no moral refinement, no spiritual 
progress. But for human suffering there would have been no 



120 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

abiding love, and never a single home on earth. If little chil- 
dren could be turned out, like little birds or little animals, to 
shift for themselves, the tenderness of the mother heart and 
the sacredness of the family tie would never have been evolved. 
Trace back every good thing, every noble thing, every sublime 
and God-like thing in human character, and you will find its 
origins in want and suffering. It was the only way that God 
could produce these supreme results. The purpose is in the 
universal law, in the common result. In countless special cases 
of suffering I can see no purpose. For this world, providence 
is clearly seen only in the solidarity of the race. 



For this world, providence is clearly seen only in the soli- 
darity of the race. Recognizing the fact that "we are made 
perfect through sufferings," we must face this question : Does 
the mental and moral progress of the world justify the suffering 
which has been required in its production ? That is a double 
question. There are two ways of looking at it. You can ask 
that question, and answer it, from the standpoint of human 
solidarity, or from the standpoint of the individual. From the 
standpoint of the race, you would have no hesitancy in giving 
an affirmative reply. You would say : " Yes ; the heights of 
civilization which humanity has attained do already show a 
justification for the sufferings of the present and of the past — 
measureless and awful as those sufferings have been. These 
final productions of the telegraph and the telephone and the 
electric light are great enough to repay mankind for the ages 
of inconvenience with tallow dips and pony express. An 
author is satisfied if he produce a really great book at the end 
of forty years' toil. The printing press and the mariner's com- 
pass and the steam engine will abundantly compensate the 
centuries of blundering struggle with stage coaches and manu- 
scripts, and timid sails that must hug the coast. The dis- 
covery of so many remedies for sickness repays man's long 
waiting and searching. The schools and the literatures we now 
enjoy are worth all the centuries of ignorance and experiment 
which led up to them. Our national Republic is worth all the 
privation of early settlers, all the horrors of Indian and foreign 
and civil wars, that have been paid for it. The gold of Cali- 



THE PROBLEM. 121 

fornia, the seals of Alaska, the diamonds of South Africa, 
the opening of trade with South America, the colonization of 
Australia, the establishment of fraternal relations with Japan, 
the benefits of English civilization carried by fire and sword into 
India, have, or will, repay humanity for all that humanity has 
suffered in the effort to accomplish these results and obtain 
these prizes. The renaissance of Italy, with its abounding 
new life of art and science and literature, was a full recom- 
pense for all the ages of darkness against which it revolted. 
Our modern intellectual freedom and rationalism compensate 
the centuries of superstition in which the church kept the 
mind of man imprisoned. The public conscience and sense of 
justice and feelings of pity, aroused by the tyranny of kings 
and the selfishness of landlords, are worth what they cost. 
The mental and moral growth of the world under Protest- 
antism compensates the agony of the millions of martyrs 
whom Catholicism put to the torture. The further devel- 
opment of the world, mental and ethical, under science and 
rationalism, compensates the bigotry and hatred and prejudice 
and petty persecutions of the Protestant churches. Looking 
at the genius of New England to-day, we can afford the Indian 
massacres, the hanging of witches, the wrath and gloom of 
Puritanism. Looking at the principles of the Gospel, we can 
afford the death of Jesus, the martyrdom of Paul, the slaugh- 
terings by Nero and Hadrian. It is quite worth while that 
William the Norman should murder the Britons and appro- 
priate their land ; worth while that Warren Hastings should 
murder the East Indians and appropriate their land ; worth 
while that Joshua should murder the Canaanites and appro- 
priate their land. Terrible, horrible, these murderous wars 
have been, but, in the advancing civilization they wrought, 
humanity has been fully repaid for all it suffered. So we can 
lump all the sicknesses, accidents, vices, crimes, tears, groans, 
ignorance, beastliness, of the whole history of man, and feel 
that man could afford it, God could afford it, in the slow out- 
working of intelligence and virtue and happiness. 

If men are to live on in this world, as is quite probable, 
another 6,000 or 600,000 years, they will improve until the civil- 
ization will be practically perfect. From their countless mis- 

16 



122 PEASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

takes men will learn how to organize society, politically and 
financially, so that every man will get justice, and every unfor- 
tunate will receive assistance. They will develop the sciences 
until a minimum of physical toil will feed and clothe the 
world, and opportunity of study and pleasure will be granted 
to every human being. They will so devise remedies, and 
master the laws of life, that sickness will become rare and 
health the almost exceptionless rule. They will so inculcate 
morality that truth and purity and kindness and mutual love 
will be the sacred inheritance of children, and jails and pen- 
alties and locks and mothers' tears of anxiety will be almost 
needless. As people live on, century after century and mil- 
lennium after millennium, and through centuries of millen- 
niums, in that glorious estate, how grandly will they feel that they 
can afford all the suffering of the world's mental childhood ! 
How nobly will the privations and agonies of these infant cen- 
turies be compensated ! How devoutly will men say that God 
is justified in creating the race — though the path to its glorious 
inheritance led through many briars and over many rough 
rocks of the primitive time ! 



Looking at this great question from the standpoint of the 
race, bracing my feet in the philosophy of solidarity, I can see 
Latimer and Ridley burning at the stake ; I can see John Calvin 
warming himself by the fire in which Servetus roasted; I can 
see the gibbets and the swinging witches on Salem Hill, and 
the deacons standing around rubbing their hands with pious 
satisfaction; I can see a hundred men smothering to death in 
the Black Hole of Calcutta ; I can see ten thousand brave 
Dutchmen cut to pieces, defenceless, in their homes in Ant- 
werp ; I can see the women and children of a New England 
village massacred by red devils ; I can see a negro girl on the 
auction block, and her mother weeping by, while a lecherous 
reprobate raises the bid; I can see the ghastly heads of 1,400 
French nobles piled about the guillotine in Place Concord ; I 
can see the Catholic dungeons of Spain filled with tortured 
heretics ; I can see John Brown and Lincoln and Garfield all 






. 



stricken down ; I can see the river of blood which has flowed 



through all human history, and hear the groans of dying mil- 









1*3 



THE PROBLEM. 128 

lions, and still say : " Yes, it can all be afforded. The mental 
and moral progress purchased by these martyrs is worth what 
it cost." I can say that, when I look at the problem from the 
standpoint of humanity. 

But what shall I say when I look at the problem from the 
standpoint of the individual ? The Brooklyn Bridge is worth 
to humanity a great deal more than the lives of the twenty men 
who were killed in the accidents of its erection. But what 
about those twenty men who were killed — does the bridge 
repay them ? Was there any voice from their dumb lips, any 
sign from their mangled bodies, proclaiming that they felt 
repaid in giving their lives for this noble improvement ? The 
American Republic will say : " The War of Rebellion has been 
worth to me all that it cost." But how about the soldier boy 
who lay forty-eight hours on the battle-field of Antietam, both 
legs torn off by a shell — lay there in unspeakable agony, and 
died ? With his last whisper, thinking of his widowed mother, 
would he say that the war compensated him ? And his mother 
— driven mad with grief, and raving these thirty years in a 
lunatic asylum — does she impress your mind with a con- 
viction that the war brought a glorious recompense to her 
heart and life ? The new France which came of the Revo- 
lution could look back and say : " All the horrors of Robes- 
piere's and Danton's rage are compensated." But what says 
the little prince, child of Marie Antoinette, a beautiful and 
lovely boy — torn from his mother's arms, whipped and cursed 
by drunken brutes, taught to swear and drink and compelled 
to listen to the fouling of his mother's purity, thrown into a 
dungeon, starved, lying there for many weeks in total darkness, 
alone, reduced to a skeleton, dying at last of filth and hunger 
— could those child eyes, so large and blue, see any personal 
recompense in the Revolution ? How about all the thousands 
and tens of thousands whose heads were chopped off, or whose 
parents and brothers were killed, whose homes were destroyed, 
and who dragged out their wretched existence in dungeons 
or in loneliness and poverty — were they satisfied with this 
arrangement by which the coming generations were to receive 
benefit and blessing at their expense ? 

The greed of wealth places overhead wires in our streets, 



124 PHA SES OF R ELIGION IN A M ERIC A . 

with their menace of death, and nothing will induce the money- 
gods to put those deadly wires under ground except a few 
human sacrifices. After twenty or thirty young men are roasted 
by the electric current the gods relent; and for gaining the 
pity of those august powers an entire city is thankful. The 
railroad gods must have hundreds more of human sacrifices 
before they will grant the mercy of elevating their tracks. 
When a sufficient number of men are ground beneath their 
wheels they will look with compassion on this profuse blood 
of atonement. They will elevate their tracks, and a city will 
rejoice in the idea of progress. Of course, the city can afford 
it. Two or three hundred lives are not many. If we can buy 
a great public improvement with two or three hundred lives 
have we not a bargain? That will do, from the solidarity 
standpoint ; but suppose you ask the mothers and wives and 
children of the men whom we have sacrificed on our bloody 
altars to the money gods — are they perfectly contented with 
this plan of paying for our comfort with their misery ? Ask 
the mangled and charred remains of the dead ! Are they the 
willing and happy sacrifices to our progress ! 

If the human race consisted of the same individuals from 
the beginning to the ending of this great career of human 
progress, there would be no question but their sufferings are 
justified. If the same men and women who were tortured in 
the Spanish Inquisition could have lived on— if they were the 
people who enjoy the triumph of religious liberty, and the for- 
ward march of those modern years — if they were the people 
who gather to-day in their peaceful churches and listen to fine 
music, and rejoice in the freedom and greatness of modern 
thought — if they were the people who make fortunes underthe 
civilization their own blood purchased — if they were here now 
to ride in their carriages and take comfort in their palatial 
homes and attend the celebrations,, eating splendid dinners 
and listening to witty speeches in their'own honor, then, doubt- 
less they would say: "We are paid for all our sufferings." 
The heroes, grown rich and honored with office, who return 
each July to the field of Gettysburg, though they carry empty 
sleeves or use crutches, they feel repaid for all the terrors of 



THE PROBLEM. 123 

that great battle. How about the comrades whose graves they 
decorate ? 

If we could take a section of human history a thousand 
years long, and allow the same people to live through the 
entire thousand years — they might be ignorant and super- 
stitious and ragged and brutal and filthy under their medieval 
priests; they might battle through the hatred and bitterness of 
the Reformation, wounded on a hundred fields of carnage ; 
they might languish in prisons, starve in deserts, be tortured at 
the rack and the stake — and if they lived on, they might suffer 
tyranny under kings, might suffer disease and cold and hunger 
and shipwreck on the way to a new country — and if they lived 
on, they might toil and sweat to found a nation in this Amer- 
ican wilderness ; might struggle with poverty and fight with 
Indians and endure a thousand painful accidents— but if they 
lived on into this time of peace and plenty and culture and gen- 
ius ; and if they — the very same folks who endured all the hard- 
ships of the ages — if they were now the comfortable and happy 
citizens of the nation which their own toil and pain had cre- 
ated ; and if they were to live on another 1,000 or 10,000 years 
to enjoy the coming progress — oh, then, there would be no 
problem to solve. Everybody would say that God is good ; 
that providence is wise and merciful ; that the end justifies the 
means ; that all the suffering could be afforded. But that is 
not the way the case stands. 



The facts in the case are that one set of people endure the 
suffering and another set of people reap the benefits. Your 
father lost his life in the war, and you have gotten rich under 
the war tariff. The Revolutionary heroes were plundered, 
killed, imprisoned and starved, during those long years while 
the British occupied New York. Your grandfather recovered 
a little patch of ground that his martyred father owned. Your 
grandfather and your father toiled like slaves to keep that 
property, and now you live sumptuously on the rents. If your 
childhood home was in the country, your own parents worked 
harder than they made their oxen work ; deprived themselves 
of even the small comforts the age afforded ; had no school- 
ing, no luxuries, no pleasure of art or music or travel ; but the 



126 PHA SES OF RELIGION IN A M ERICA . 

railroad came along, and a town was built on the old farm they 
dug out of the wilderness, and you are gloriously provided for. 
Splendid thing for you ; but they only got their homespun and 
their bacon out of it. They had the oil, and you have the re- 
compense. A hundred thousand men were shot down in the 
war that another hundred thousand might be clothed in purple 
and fine linen. One set of progressive thinkers have been 
driven from their pulpits and hounded into poverty and ob- 
scurity, or killed outright, that another set of progressive 
thinkers may stand in their pulpits and preach what they be- 
lieve and get comfortably paid for it. Untold millions have 
died under the crude experiments of science that scientists 
might cure other millions. It required the horrors of slavery 
in all countries, through countless generations, to shame the 
world into a bold strike for human liberty. 

On the supposition that there is a God who plans and brings 
things to pass, is it right that one class of men should thus 
suffer for another class ? Look at the multitudes who toil, on 
the streets and docks, in mines and sewers, in the holds of 
vessels and in stifling factories, in the scorching heat of cotton 
and coffee and sugar plantations, in the armies of kings — see 
how ignorant, how brutal, how like animals they are, and must 
be kept, in that low physical toil ! That brutal work must be 
done, if other multitudes are to have the luxuries of life, the 
money and time for travel and study and culture — but is it 
right for one class to do the drudgery that another class may 
enjoy the luxury ? Would you put one of your boys in a slave 
pen and compel him to toil his life away, heaping up money for 
the other boy to live pleasantly upon ? Can God be justified 
for creating a world in which one generation of his children 
must agonize that another generation may smile ? 

Geologists tell us that man has been on this earth at least 
240,000 years, and he is just now beginning to be civilized, in 
any noble and happy sense — still fighting and quarreling and 
persecuting and robbing as if he came from the primitive 
chaos but yesterday. How slow the progress has been ! What 
ages and ages of ignorance and brutality ! Suppose man is to 
live here another 240,000 years — that he is now speedily to 
attain perfection, and then to enjoy its fruits through all these 



TEE PROBLEM. 127 

coming ages — is it right to subject the first half to such igno- 
miny and pain that the second half may be unspeakably happy ! 

But even that is not the severe test to which this problem 
must be put. The men of each generation live here but a few- 
years. Shall there be 240,000 years of pain and struggle and 
beastliness that we may be happy for thirty or fifty years ! If 
all the miriads of the past could live a moment now, and see 
the result of their privations — happiness for you and me during 
thirty or fifty years — wouldn't they feel that such brief joy for 
us had been purchased at an infinite cost ! Can we feel that it 
is worthwhile ! Can we be honestly thankful for half a century 
of pleasure for which God has paid the lives of so many bil- 
lions and trillions of his creatures ! 

If there is no God, and all of this is but the outworking of 
chance or blind force, then we can accept it, and feel selfishly 
glad that our turn came thus late — selfishly sorry that our turn 
could not have been delayed till a still better time ; but, from 
the standpoint of individualism, and if death be the limit, 
there can be no honest gratitude. If death be the end, the 
unfortunate people of the past and the poor and suffering 
people of the present are the victims of an unspeakable injus- 
tice or they are the slaves of an unconscious and unpurposing 
fate ; they are the children of a meaningless accident or the 
subjects of a most horrible tyranny. 

There is no justification for the Creator in this world. From 
the facts of human life, this side of death — and these are the 
only facts we can establish — we are not warranted in calling 
God " The Father." Does that give the case over to the atheist ? 
It does, it must, if the case ends at death. Materialism and 
atheism go together. Without life beyond death the thought 
of an over-ruling Providence becomes a cruel absurdity. Rest- 
ing in the facts of human history religion has no case. In the 
light of what is the problem is insoluble. Faith alone can 
justify the ways of God. 

If there is life beyond, in which all those who have sickened 
and suffered by the way shall be lifted into health and hap- 
piness — life beyond, in which the millions of the ignorant, the 
brutal, the criminal, the sensual, will be developed into intel- 



1 2 8 PHA SES OF RELIGION IN A M ERICA . 

ligent, refined, beautiful, lovable characters — life beyond, in 
which the barbarians, the savages, the cannibals, will evolve 
genius and goodness — life beyond, in which all the martyrs to 
the world's growth and progress are to enjoy a. full fruitage of 
their own privations and sufferings — if there is life beyond, in 
which all the generations of the dead are living on and pro- 
gressing, as the succeeding generations have made progress 
here— if there is life beyond, in which every human being shall 
have at least as good a portion as the most fortunate can ever 
have in this world — if that be true, and only if that be true, can 
we say that God is good. 

Evolution for the race does not show that God is a father; 
there must be evolution for each individual. By the slow 
developments of life, from the primitive savage up through 
countless generations, were produced the mind of Plato and 
the morals of Jesus. If the primitive savages have lived on in 
some other realm and have reached the mental powers of 
Plato and the moral grandeurs of Jesus, that, or nothing short 
of that, would recompense the wasted lives of the savages. 

If immortality be a fact, then God has wasted no lives by the 
way and all the sufferings that have been are well afforded. 
We may think it impossible that God could begin a human life 
in any other way than this mortal way. If He is to produce 
wise and holy spirits for his own happy companionship, we 
may reverently suppose that He was obliged to make use of this 
humble method in the beginning of his work. The fact that 
He has done so is our warrant. If we could accomplish the 
same happy result for our children by a painful or by a painless 
method, we would choose the latter. That God has cast the 
infancy of our spirits in a world of pain is sufficient evidence 
that no painless infancy was possible. This can well be afforded 
if the spirit life of each is to eventuate in mental and moral 
culture. 

That one suffers more than another in this world does not 
constitute an argument against the Divine goodness, if all are 
to become supremely and limitlessly happy. 

We may reverently assume that God could not create pure 
and happy spirits, as we dream the angels in Heaven ; else He 
would have created us so, and thus have avoided the poor and 



THE PROBLEM. 129 

suffering necessities of our bodily existence. He can surely 
take no pleasure in the weaknesses and disappointments and 
bereavements of this kindergarten world. It must be that this 
is the only possible method by which we could be led on into 
the university life beyond. 

With the same deep reverence we may assume that God 
could only produce the race, in this world, by evolution. Had 
it been possible to create men outright, with the intellects of 
Plato and the morals of Jesus, a good God must have adopted 
that method, and thereby prevented these numberless ages of 
ignorance and vice and crime and suffering. 

With most worshipful minds we can think of God as looking 
forward upon human history, and saying : " They must begin 
at the bottom. They will have everything to learn. In their 
ignorance they will suffer, and commit all crimes, and fall into 
all vices; but they will slowly develop wisdom and virtue. I 
shall give them the boon of death, and beyond death a better 
opportunity, where they will develop more rapidly. I will 
environ them with the laws and forces of progress. They will 
pass through the pain, through the vices and sorrows of their 
infant state, and they will become wise and happy. It can be 
afforded. The end will justify the means. The eternal years 
will show their existence to be an inestimable blessing. At 
last they will understand that I gave them life out of infinite 
love." 



17 



130 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 



THE METHOD. 

Evolution for the individual — the final holiness and happiness 
of all men — with such an outlook we can worship God as the 
Heavenly Father. How shall these things be? What is the 
Divine Method of bringing such glory to pass ? 

Drummond's " Natural Law in the Spiritual World" is one 
of the most widely read of religious books in this age. The 
title of that book is the key-note of all the great harmonies 
that are to come in the world's coming theology. The title is 
greater than the book. It is a noble prophecy which the book 
does not fulfill. The book makes use of certain scientific prin- 
ciples to illustrate theology, it does not apply science to life. 
The title is great. The suggestion that God is developing the 
spiritual universe by a system of natural laws and forces, that 
in moral and spiritual experience, as in matter, God works sci- 
entifically—that is great. If we can determine what are the 
laws of life in this world, then we may scientifically and rever- 
ently assume that we know the laws of life in all worlds. Any 
law of matter is the same throughout existence. Any law of 
moral or religious experience must be invariable in all worlds, 
or our thought of the future is baseless. 

" The spiritual world " is not specially " the world beyond " ; 
it is the super-physical world, here and everywhere. For the 
present discussion, and at this stage of the discussion, it is suffi- 
cient to say that " the spiritual world " means moral experience . 
What are the laws of moral experience ? When that question 
is answered the Divine plan of salvation is made clear. 



The first great law of moral evolution is the law of cause and 
effect, of planting and reaping, of seedtime and harvest. There 
is no such thing as reward. There is no such thing as punish- 
ment. There are consequences. That is the law of nature in 
the physical world. That is the natural law in the menta. 
world. That is God's law in the moral world. 



THE METHOD. 131 

In our human world, in our political governments, there are 
rewards and punishments — at least there are punishments — 
better think twice before saying there are any rewards. We 
tine men and jail them and hang them for doing wrong. I am 
not aware that we give them anything for doing right. In our 
families and in our schools we have arbitrary rewards and pun- 
ishments. You give the little girl a chocolate caromel for keep- 
ing quiet during prayers. Just possibly you give her something 
else if she persistently refuses to keep quiet. In our schools 
we have medals and prizes and various methods of external dis- 
cipline, more or less, usually less effective ; but the Almighty 
does not deal in chocolate creams or prize medals. In all his 
realm of natural law, both physical and spiritual, there are no 
rewards and no punishments — there are consequences. 

You are not punished for over-eating or injudicious drink- 
ing; you suffer the consequences of indigestion or drunken- 
ness. You are not rewarded for keeping t^he physical laws ; you 
enjoy the consequences of health and vigor. You are not pun- 
ished for your mental indolence and sloth; you reap the con- 
sequences in a disgraceful ignorance, in poverty of mind, in 
your blindness to millions of beautiful things and thoughts, in 
all the disadvantages of stupidity. You are not rewarded for 
your study and careful research and ceaseless diligence ; you 
have the glorious consequences in knowledge, ideas, the ability 
to think, the power to accomplish and the sublime conscious- 
ness of being a master in this world of ideas and facts. You 
are not punished for lying and cheating and gossiping, for 
indulging a suspicious temper, a vulgar sentiment, a sensual 
imagination ; you suffer the consequences in losing the respect 
of people, in the loss of self respect, in losing all the nobler 
sources of joy, in degrading your own ability to be honest or 
truthful or clean-minded, in fastening these vile habits, like 
serpents, with all their torments, upon your soul. 

In the legends of the Round Table is the story of Caradoc, a 
young, handsome, valiant knight, on whose arm a reptile 
fastened, sucking his life-blood slowly away, while Caradoc 
wandered from castle to castle and finally betook himself to the 
deep wood, emaciated, crazed, to die alone — such is the conse- 
quence of a vile habit of body or mind. Let all young gentle- 



132 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

men in the first stages of tippling or sensuality ponder it well. 
You are not rewarded for any nor all your virtues ; you reap 
the happy consequences — respected and trusted by men — the 
honors and positions of the world awaiting you — your own high 
consciousness of right becoming an unspeakable joy within you. 

I speak advisedly of a certain popular hymn-book — the Bliss 
and Sankey collection — when I say that for all the trash and 
nonsense and sickly sentimentalism and bad phylosophy heaped 
into it — for all such imbecility as " O, to be nothing !" as if a 
good many people were not near enough to it already — for such 
falsehood as "Jesus paid it all " — for such abominable misrep- 
resentation as "Pull for the Shore," telling us that humanity 
is an old stranded hulk — for all of it there is something like a 
recompense in that one scientific song, "What shall the Har- 
vest be ?" That rests upon the solid ground — Gospel ground 
and scientific ground, for Gospel of Christ and science of life 
are one. "Ye shall reap as ye sow." 

In Freyteg's " Lost Manuscript " the ingenious author sur- 
rounds one of his characters with infinistessimal fairies which 
are the objective and living realities of his habits of thought 
and feeling. I take certain liberties with the text in order to 
bring out the idea a little more clearly. I do not mean to abuse 
but to amplify the author's suggestion. A business man, a great 
landed proprietor, lives to make money and enjoy it in his own 
selfish ways. He rides abroad over his fields, and a cloud of 
fairies swarm about his head. They are in shapes like gold and 
silver coins, like grains of wheat and barley, like horses and 
cattle and sheep and pigs, like miniature barns and banks and 
warehouses, like puddings and wine-bottles and beer-bottles, 
and that proprietor can see nothing else than these and the 
things they represent. They hide the blooming flowers at his 
feet, the majesty of the rolling landscape, the gorgeous sunset, 
the radiant stars ; and when he returns home, they hide the 
beauty and the happy smiles of his own children. They make 
such a buzzing and clinking and minute neighing and lowing 
and bleating and grunting in his ears that he can hear nothing 
else — deaf to music, to the songs of the birds, to human laugh- 
ter and weeping. And if he takes up a newspaper to read, and 
there happens to be a literary article or a pleasing story or a 



THE METHOD. 133 

fine description of travel, those absurd little fairies settle upon 
it like hiving bees and hide it from his thought — they will 
only allow him to read the market reports and the notices of 
investment companies and the advertisements of things to eat 
and drink. 

About the head of a student, who is also an artist, there is 
another swarm of fairies ; and they have shapes like flowers 
and trees and birds, and their wings reflect infinite beautiful 
bits of landscape and water-fall and mountain scenery and 
ruined castles and cathedral towers and ivied cottages, and 
others have the miniature faces of ancient heroes, poets, phi- 
losophers, with little bodies like temples and pyramids and 
sphinxes; while others take the forms of buried art— madonnas, 
muses, gods and saints, till the student sees nothing ugly or 
vulgar in all the world. He dwells continually amid classic 
grandeurs and natural graces, and hears the music of fine 
thoughts and noble sentiments and the murmur of brooks and 
the songs of birds and the laughter of children — and thus he 
lives, in a world of delight. 

A great moralist was once asked to substitute a better word 
for this much-abused theological word — Salvation ; and he re- 
plied, Habit. That is a deeper and truer word even than char- 
acter ; for character is the result of habit. 

If you want a confidential clerk, who shall write and read 
your private business letters, who shall know all about the se- 
crets of the firm, to whom you will often intrust the handling 
of money, do you care very much whether he is a Republican 
or a Democrat, whether he believes in Allopathy or Homoeo- 
pathy, whether he accepts the Presbyterian or the Unitarian 
theology ? It is your experience, perhaps, that clerks and 
book-keepers are not much more likely to be honest or dishonest 
for any of these reasons. What you want in him, aside from 
his fitness for the work, is honesty. You want to know what 
his habits are not what his theology is nor what his politics 
may be. You might go to his room and find The Tribune or 
The Times or The Catholic World or The Churchman or The 
Universalist Monthly, and you would hardly consider it any of 
your affair ; but if you found his table piled high with Sporting 
Worlds and Police Gazettes, you would make that your affair. 



134 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

You would not be influenced in any determination to employ 
him because he attended an Orthodox church or a Liberal 
church, or none ; but if you learn that he spends his evenings 
in the saloon and his holidays at the race-track — you will be 
influenced by that. You must believe that his habits, his secret 
habits of conduct and thought, are worthy. 

There are no rewards and no punishments. There are inev- 
itable consequences : and John Calvin himself never preached 
the decrees of God too strongly; if by decree v of God you un- 
derstand this — that men must obey the moral laws of this uni- 
verse, or be crushed beneath them. If to be converted means 
to turn from the wrong and do right, then no Methodist ex- 
horter ever plead for your soul too earnestly, or pictured the 
certain ruin of the unconverted too vividly. The hells that 
yawn, but a little way off, in the paths of the liar, the cheat, the 
gambler, the tippler and the sensualist, are awful enough to 
wring tears of pity from the stars. " Reformation ?" said the 
matron of a reform home to me, " reformation ? O, yes ; with 
infinite patience and love we find it possible ; but you can form 
a thousand minds to virtue while you are reforming one that 
has fallen away." 



Well, as we pass on into deeper and deeper experiences, what 
is the next law, or the next phase of this same law, upon which 
we come? It is this — the demand for payment — the necessity 
of reaping. In physical nature there is no malice and no for- 
giveness. There is healing, and the pain of healing. A broken 
arm must get well. The break is not pardoned. It is vain to 
offer an excuse. It makes no difference that your arm was 
broken by accident while rescuing a child from fire. The life- 
forces are present to heal. In healing there is soreness. Heal- 
ing, not forgiveness, is the Divine law. 

There are people of intellectual dissipation, who read a class 
of literature which inflames and intoxicates and enervates until 
they become mental sots, satisfied with nothing but the alcohol 
of sensationalism — such minds are not restored to vigor and 
culture by forgiveness— only by the processes of healing and 
growth will they come into any fine appreciation of Emerson 



THE METHOD. 133 

or Browning or George Eliot. That dissipated intellect, even 
when brought into the church by a reformed moral sense, asks 
for theological sensationalism and the feverish excitements of 
the revival. 

Suppose the moral nature is diseased by unclean habits of 
thought or conduct — still God's method is healing. Wrecked 
morality must be reconstructed. No angel is sent to carry men 
from the valley's depth to the mountain top. Mortals must 
climb. Learning to do right, when people have long pleased 
themselves with evil, is the most difficult lesson that men. ever 
learn. However men wander from God's laws they must 
struggle and suffer their way back to those laws. There is no 
easy method of reform. There is no magical readjustment. 
There is painful retracing of steps. There is education of the 
better instincts. Folding us about and filling all existence are 
the Divine life-forces. There is healing. There is new growth. 
Obedience to the moral law lifts the flood-gate and lets in the 
stream of life. Disobedience puts men on the track in front of 
the engine where the laws will crush them. Obedience puts 
them in the car where the laws will serve them. Life of right- 
eousness will not compromise. It demands everything. Come 
into harmony with it, and it yields everything. 

I can imagine a company of great musicians, led by a real 
master, practicing together so long and faithfully that the mu- 
sical sense becomes a common and pervasive intuition, until the 
leader of such an orchestra might go on and on with improvi- 
sations, all the players carrying their parts without fault or flaw to 
the master's violin. Indeed, I have read of a brother and sister 
who could do this. So I can understand that a man may come 
into such perfect love of purity and generosity that his every 
thought and feeling accords with the laws of righteousness — 
his soul forever receptive to the inflow of God's life. 



At this point it is impossible to refuse the theistic question : 
Does God forgive ? Morality here becomes theology, and a 
consideration of the law of religious experience will not longer 
be delayed. Forgiveness has a double meaning, objective and 
subjective. We have seen that there is no objective forgiveness. 
A man becomes a drunkard, lives twenty years in the slums, 



136 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

commits all vices and crimes, ruins his health, squanders his 
money, loses his reputation ; and then, an old burnt-out wreck 
of his former self, repents, prays, begins a reformation — " for- 
given," we say, but his health and his fortune and his reputa- 
tion are not restored — he must begin at the bottom and win all 
these anew. 

Subjective forgiveness is a change of feeling on the part of 
those who have been sinned against. A man insults you and 
you hate him for it. He becomes ashamed of it ; seeks an op- 
portunity of doing some kindness that may prove his contrition 
and win back your esteem. You accept the kindness in kindly 
spirit. You turn down that blotted leaf in memory's book, and 
paste it down. Friendship is re-established. You have for- 
given. Can you imagine those changes of feeling with God ? 
If He gets angry, and outlives his wrath, and is mollified, then 
in him also is the change from hate to love that, in men, is for- 
giveness. But if there is no night there can be no break of 
day. Eternal sunlight has no dawn. In God is the ceaseless 
love which is infinitely better than forgiveness. We come into 
the light, but the light has never been darkened. 

When I entered the cathedral of Cologne I had a child-like 
sensation that it bad just been created and for my special sake. 
Then the thought that a million others had felt so made it still 
more charming. Each flower may look up to the sun and say 
" Thou art mine." The personalness of the relation is enhanced 
by the infiniteness of the benevolence. If you had loved your 
friend so well that you could not get angry,. and could not for- 
give, the friendship would be all the nobler when he returned 
to it. A mother cannot forgive her little child because the 
fountains of her love are never reduced. Because she loves it 
perfectly she insists on cultivating its manners, on correcting 
its habits, that it may become clean and strong and beautiful 
of soul. That God requires our absolute obedience is proof 
of his changeless affection. What unimaginable patience 
broods over these years of human plodding and blundering ! 

If your child must undergo some severe pain at the surgeon's 
hand, you cannot bear the pain, but you can hold the child in 
your arms and love him with a tenderness that is unspeakable, 
and he can look up into your face and feel that you know best 






THE METHOD. 137 

what is good for him, and then he can bear the pain. We may 
sacredly believe that God's infinite sympathy thus folds his 
children round in all they suffer, for all the laws they have 
broken. We must bear the pain, but in the pain is his own life 
of healing. Our relations to him change, while his relation to • 
us is changeless. 

God is the Infinite Spirit of Life in whom we dwell. A tree 
does not get an apple somewhere and pin it on the twig ; out 
of its own life it produces the apple. Out of God our souls 
have grown. The instinct of reverence is a kind of unconscious 
memory of our Divine origin. Fire ascending seeks the sun ; 
rivers to the ocean run ; both speed them to their source. So 
do these native hungers of worship and trust lead us up again 
to our Eternal Mother. 

God is spirit and we are spirit, and in the prayerful mood our 
souls come into vital contact with his. Prayer is the state of 
being spiritually receptive. Put back the shutter and sun- 
light enters. Go to a discouraged man with true sympathy and 
he will get moral strength of your sympathy. God's offer of 
life to men is as constant as the sun and as personal as human 
affection. How his life comes into ours with healing, we do not 
know. We do not know how the sun wakens life in a seed, nor 
what that life is when wakened. We know what it does. It 
builds up a grass blade, a rose bush, a tree, yields flowers and 
fruits. How God's spirit quickens ours we know not, for our 
life of soul is as much a mystery as his. These blessed facts 
we know, that in prayerful mood people get comfort of their 
sorrow, strength to overcome temptation, moral supremacy by 
which they face about and forsake evil and bear the pain of it 
and struggle back to righteousness. 

These divinest experiences are under law as absolutely as our 
physical experiences. The fact that life passes from soul to 
soul, from God to man — that we may depend on. The law of it 
is the law of receptivity — how, is beyond our ken. In physics 
we know there is transference and transformation of force. 
Motion becomes heat, electricity becomes light, vibration be- 
comes music. In metaphysics we know just as well that there 
is transference and transformation of force. Thought becomes 
feeling. Emotion changes into thought. Pity leaps up into 

18 



138 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

generosity. Sympathy transforms into love. Some great say- 
ing of Carlyle or Goethe, as you read it, becomes reverence and 
hope in your spirit. A mother's outpouring affection becomes 
moral integrity in her son. These spiritual forces are facts, 
realities, just as truly as motion and electricity are facts. God 
is the Infinite Fountain of spiritual life — life which feeds our 
moral nature as we put ourselves in condition to receive it. 
Our relations with God are just as scientific as our relations 
with matter. Our prayer is the harmonious mood in which 
alone He can give us of his life by spiritual contact. 

There is no reward and no punishment ; there are conse- 
quences. There is no forgiveness and no malice ; there is har- 
mony and there is healing. 



What is the next great phase of the law of human experi- 
ence ? It is this : there is no forgetfulness. In his laws of 
nature God never forgets. Did you sprain your wrist when 
you were a growing boy ; and were you heedless and head- 
strong, disregarding the doctor's orders, so that it never healed 
properly ? It may seem to be quite well, and you may forget it 
twenty or forty years ; but nature does not forget, and when 
you are old and rheumatic the pains will take you there first. 

People are dying all around us, every day, not from any im- 
mediate causes ; but as the slow result of colds and malarias 
and overstraining of nerves and the abuse of digestive powers, 
from overfeeding and laziness and dissipation and a hundred 
breakings of the laws of health, which date back ten or thirty 
years. It is all laid up against them. They have been slowly 
adding to the mortgage until the mortgage equals their capital 
and the account is closed. Nature generally charges interest 
also, and takes it out of the principal on an advance payment. 

If I may change the figure slightly, nature will allow you to 
overdraw the account a great many times — she will allow you 
to use up eighty years of health in twenty-five years if you wish 
to — but she never makes a mistake in her bookkeeping ; and 
when you have drawn all that will ever be due, she refuses 
to honor another draft — not as much as the draft of one single 
breath. Like a relentless cashier, she closes the window in 
your face, and you are dead. 



THE METHOD. 139 

There is no forgetfulness. A moral sickness that was not 
perfectly cured, lingers, secretly, in the soul, like an enemy hid- 
den in the fortress, to strike you unawares. An evil appetite, 
or a sensuality, half-cured, occasionally pandered, takes advan- 
tage of your first moment of weakness, your first great temp- 
tation, to drag you down to disgrace. 

Perhaps the most remarkable illustration in history of that 
fact is the Roman Emperor Augustus. In his early days a man 
of almost unimaginable cruelty, a traitor, a pirate, a murderer, 
an assassin, a tyrant steeped in blood, who poisoned and stab- 
bed his way to the throne. Then, as a matter of policy, with- 
out any real change of heart, he brought an iron will to bear 
on his conduct. He would win the favor of the great families 
whose princes or pretenders he had murdered. He would gain 
the applause of the multitude. He compelled himself to act 
gently. He would accept suggestions, he would bear criticism, 
he even endured ridicule, and for thirty years, all but the few 
who saw and heard him in private, thought him the most pa- 
cific and patient of men. He had not killed, and did not try 
to kill, the spirit of cruelty within him. By sheer force of will 
he kept that spirit from manifesting itself in public. But, my 
friends, that will not do. Any vice, secretly harbored, will con- 
quer at last. When Augustus, a little past middle life, got sick, 
so that his will was enfeebled, there was the demon within him 
and it sprang forth, and Augustus, again, was the bloody tyrant, 
the foul-mouthed and foul-minded assassin. Nature makes no 
mistakes in her book-keeping. She does not forget. Now is 
the time to pay up all the debts for the moral laws you have 
broken. The evil within you must be crushed, root and branch. 
The sooner it is done, the easier. When I say nature never 
forgets, I mean that God requires the payment of every evil at 
your hands. Nature's laws are simply God's methods of deal- 
ing with men. 

In his laws of nature God is just as careful to remember and 
credit you with every obedience, every faithfulness, every vir- 
tue of your lifetime, from childhood's hour to this present hour. 
Mr. Gladstone survived a sickness last autumn that few men 
could have borne at his age. God credited him with these 
fourscore years of temperance and exercise and regular habits 



140 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

and careful diet. At the age of eighty-six James Martineau's 
intellect is as clear and strong and rich and brilliant as it was at 
forty-six. In profound reasoning or in delicacy of humor or in 
splendor of rhetoric, there is not a writer in England or America 
that can meet him on a fair field. What does it mean ? It 
means that James Martineau has kept the laws of intellectual 
health. He has never been the slave of bigotry or tradition. 
He has never allowed his mind to be swayed or colored by 
prejudice. He has never been a special pleader for this or that 
theological attitude. He has loved the truth. He has always 
uttered, without fear or favor, his exact thought. If he had 
practiced quibbling and played to the galleries ; if he had 
written to please the prejudiced and the stupid ; if he had ap- 
pealed to the whims and sentimentalities of the brethren from 
Wayback ; if he had struggled to maintain a set of dogmas, 
glibly avoiding facts and perverting arguments and adroitly 
smothering his convictions, he would now be as bigoted and 
sour and cranky and ungenerous and purblind as many another 
superannuated theologian who needlessly postpones his de- 
parture. 

Here and there, among your acquaintances, you can think of 
aged men and women who have not become narrow or peevish 
or selfish or melancholy — whom the frost of old age has 
touched but to mellow and ripen and sweeten. It is because 
they were not suspicious and fault-finding in their younger days. 
It is as if they had asked themselves, every morning of those 
fourscore years, " What shall the harvest be ?" Old age is 
simply the harvest of what we sow in youth and middle life. 
Men do not gather figs of thistles. 

No reward, no punishment, no forgiveness, no forgetfulness — 
forever and forever the exact consequences. One thing more : 
this eternal law of life or death is within us, and there is no 
hiding from ourselves. There is no escaping our own shadow. 
When Romola was flying from an unloved duty, the old priest 
said to her : " Daughter, how will you find good ? It is not a 
thing of choice. It is a river that flows from the foot of the 
Invisible Throne and flows by the path of obedience. Man 
cannot choose his duties. You may forsake your duties and 
the sorrows which they bring * * * then you will find sor- 



THE METHOD. 141 

row without duty; bitter herbs and no bread with them." The 
law of life is within us ; a Divine command that cannot be 
escaped. " If you disobey, it will hang on you like a chain 
that will drag forever." Good is not of choice, but of obedi- 
ence. Duty is the sweet and wholesome bread which alone 
makes the bitter herbs of sorrow endurable. These laws of 
life are from the Invisible Throne, and they crush that they 
may drive men to obedience ; and then they heal. 



Such are the present facts, and such must be the eternal facts. 
When shall we put away the superstitions which gather about 
death ! We are so prone to imagine that everything is going 
to be changed at death, that these natural laws of the spiritual 
world will not hold good after death ! You look at your neigh- 
bor — a true man, honest, noble, pure, a man of genius and 
character, of whom you are proud to say, " He is my fellow- 
townsman " ; worthy of being trusted to the ends of the earth, 
a man of ability and careful judgment, cultured, courteous, 
a power in the business world, an ornament in the social world, 
a patriot, a moral hero, a glorious friend, a charming compan- 
ion, cheerful as a June morning and pure as gold — the like 
of which, were all men so, would make this earth a heaven to 
live in — you look at him as he walks the street and you say, 
" What a magnificent specimen of manhood." So far as this 
life is concerned, there is no question about it, he is grandly, 
beautifully saved — but you take up your evening paper and 
your face blanches, you are faint and sick at heart — your friend 
is dead. 

Then you go and look at the pale face in the casket, you 
hear the burial service, and up comes your superstitions — you 
wonder if that splendid life he lived on earth will count for 
anything in the sight of God. Is he saved over there as he 
was saved here, or do these laws of life stop short at the death 
of the body, and from that on is there a different universe with 
different laws ? 

If we were to live right on in this world, 1,000, 10,000 years — 
don't try to think of the end — if we were to live right on here, 
then we would all understand that the building of pure and noble 
character was God's purpose — salvation. Now just think of 



142 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

death as an accident to the body. Think of human life in this 
world and the next as if there were no death — as if we slept 
and awoke, and lived on. That solves the problem. There is 
a break of the land between two continents. The ocean rolls 
its tides there, and the ocean seems bottomless — the land 
breaks off, but the atmosphere does not break ; it reaches over 
the land and over the sea, continuous and undisturbed. This 
earthly body breaks off — another body of some sort may be 
taken on — but the soul lives, and its life is unbroken, undis- 
turbed, by death. Character is continuous. The laws of life 
are the same in all worlds. No reward, no punishment — con- 
sequences. No forgiveness and no forgetfulness and no escap- 
ing the laws within us — but there is healing, growth, harvest 
and harmony. 



THE HOPE. 143 



THE HOPE. 

A critic wishes to know my rationalistic ground for belief in 
the " final holiness and happiness of all men." 

In the first place, I do not think of Heaven as a walled city 
or garden or park, nor of Hell as a walled prison. I do not 
think of the place (any place) as constituting the happiness of 
an abode in the next sphere of existence, any more than it 
does in this phase of existence. Heaven, in this world or any 
other, is where good people congregate. Every meeting of 
true friends, every pure home, every place of intellectual and 
honest work, is Heaven. There are happy people in St. 
Petersburg, in Van Couver, in Valparaiso, in Victoria, in fron- 
tier camps and mountain cottages. There are bad and un- 
happy people in Fifth avenue palaces and Pall Mall mansions. 
Victor Hugo was a happy man in exile. John Bunyan was 
happy in prison. 

I imagine that the universe beyond death is a free country. 
People can make their homes where they choose. It will not 
even require a passport to go from one district or dominion to 
another. Heaven and Hell, as distinct localities, are myths. 
We find them in the same houses here. "Getting to Heaven," 
"Getting out of Hell," are childish expressions. What is, here, 
and what must be over yonder, is reformation, character build- 
ing, goodnes, spiritual culture. This is the only real question : 
Will those who die in wickedness be reformed beyond death ? 
The answer to that depends on this further question : Do they 
try to reform the wicked over there ? I have heard Heaven 
preached as if it were a walled-in city of the elect, whose gates 
were closed to any that might of themselves reform, whose 
infinitely selfish and lazy and stony-hearted inhabitants were 
the only people in the universe who did not support a mis- 
sionary society — who had utterly forgotten to be charitable or 
helpful. Such a Heaven would not be as good as the poorest, 
most sectarian and bigoted and bickering church on earth. I 



144 PHASES OF RELIGION IN AMERICA. 

do not think that St. Paul ceased his missionary work at death. 
I cannot imagine that Jesus lost all concern for sinners at his 
crucifixion. It is impossible to believe that Wilberforce and 
Howard and Elizabeth Fry and Wesley and Mrs. Booth and 
Gough gave up trying to reform and rescue the fallen, when 
they crossed the river. Our sainted mothers could never 
be so charmed with a happy place as to lose interest in their 
own wayward boys, or in any of the neighbor boys. There 
can be no satisfactory Heaven for them until all they love are 
redeemed. If there are angels, they are infinitely poorer than 
mortals, and not at all worthy of our respect, if they are not 
also engaged in the universal work of reforming, teaching, 
uplifting. 

What are the prophets and apostles and martyrs and saints 
doing over there — what are reformers and educators and 
preachers doing — what are the philosophers and poets and 
artists and scientists and statesmen doing — what are the fathers 
and mothers and friends aad neighbors doing, if not complet- 
ing the work they begun here — the work of purifying and 
educating the race ? Have they lost all sense of charity, all 
enthusiasm for humanity, all love of truth and right? Does 
Heaven rob people of the very qualities which made them 
godliest on earth? Then it were a great mistake for good peo- 
ple to die. Then "going to Heaven" were the death of their 
own goodness. If these millions of saviors could live on here 
for a thousand years they would save this world. If they keep 
the old fire of moral enthusam, they will put out all fires of 
sensual torment in the world to come. Give Jesus and Paul 
and Wesley and Gough and Mrs. Booth the unwearing bodies 
of angels, and a thousand years' time, and see what they will 
accomplish among the heathendoms and slums of the spiritual, 
universe ! 



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